Don’s pre/amplifiers are not exactly just “interesting flea watt things” but great sounding visual masterpieces 
just out of curiosity, since it should be easy for you: go see (and listen) yourself 
and just in case… his 3 years long (plus he’s always “a little” behind) waiting line might rescue you from any temptation 
I came in here, despite the warning and think I am loseing the will to go on. (My Own Fault)
Does anyone here have a system where they come home, Kick off their shoes and just play Music?
No thought for technicalities and formats, just lost in Music?
Luckily I do…
P.S. Enjoy the tech…
Me too, in both my places of residence, just introduced a friend to Devialet (after 300b valve amps) and he now does the same. Sent me a message last night after a 5 hour listening session and is over the moon with his system now.
Now that I’m substantially where I want to be with hardware and software, I just need to turn on my amplifier (which turns itself off after about a half-hour with no incoming signal), fire up the Roon app on my iPad, and I’m good to go. This morning, I was in heaven — listening to the last Tony Williams album — before, alas, I had to leave for the office.
Yes, definitely, I do. And frankly I don’t tinker much anymore, it’s been Roon+HQP to microRendu over NAA for a while now and that just works.
Big leap! 
I just looked this up… I might give him a call!
It was, I was shocked when he did it. I had gone from valve front end and KT88 power amp to Devialet D200 before that and just love it. Now have D1000 pro in U.K. And D120 in Spain.
Been there since 2004. Only component that’s changed a few times in my setup since then is the DAC.
Currently listening on a TEAC CD radio combo thing with AE speakers which cost me nothing! Am I enjoying it… yup… does it sound great… nope… but the music does!
How exactly would Roon be altering the sound encoded in the bits?
I’ve read the manual and I know it’s not supposed to do anything to the PCM upsampling but it does. Others have reported this as a bug. I think it might be just a volume difference but it could be more.
By altering the way those encoded bits are decoded. Or, rather, by altering them in a different way than HQPlayer does, since that’s the OP’s frame of reference.
I thought the DAC did the decoding and that Roon provided the bit perfect stream. Does the HQplayer backend alter the stream before it gets to the DAC?
Yes. or rather it can. It all depends.
Thanks is that what people are referring to I this discussion? Can the bit perfect stream from Roon be changed by HQplayer before it gets to the DAC?
Of course, Roon sends the bit perfect stream to HQP. What happens from there is up to HQP.
In threads like this there are usually many people talking about a variety of things, often at cross-purposes and with strong assumptions or views, hence my fun with the title.
If you want to talk sensibly about SQ and computer sources then imo it is important at the outset to distinguish between direct connection ( computer to DAC), where many things can make a difference and Ethernet/WiFi connection to a renderer and then to a DAC. In the latter case the list of things within the source computer that can make a difference to SQ is much shorter.
HQP is a pre-processor in that it performs various steps (upsampling, modulation and filtering) typically carried out in modern DACs, bypassing the steps inside the DAC that would ordinarily do so. This is the reason why non-oversampling (NOS) DACs are popular among HQP users, they don’t have to pay for circuitry they won’t use.
So asking whether HQP is bit-perfect is a bit like asking if a car will still travel in a straight line if the steering mechanism is engaged. The answer is not necessarily, but that doesn’t mean HQP is doing things badly; it’s doing what the user tells it to. Choosing an apodising filter for a modulator will mean the output is not bit perfect in comparison with the input, in the same way that selecting such a filter within a DAC has that consequence for the input/output of the equivalent circuitry in the DAC.
Roon 1.3 contains upsampling and filtering DSP. It’s a good implementation, but has fewer options than HQP. When any DSP functions are operative then Roon will no longer be producing bit-perfect output and the purple light won’t appear in the footer. So what will appear ? Wait and see. I think you’ll like it.
Ok, I was not aware of this… Thx.
