Roon With HQ Player Popping Sound Between Track

Audio Gear Talk HQ Player
1

Running HQ Player with Roon. Converting all files to DSD 128. Most of my files are FLAC some DSD64 and Tidal.

When using say songs from Queue or radio when songs change from say a FLAC file to DSD lot of times I will get a loud pop sound between track. Say I play all songs from same file format it doesn’t happen. Also still sometimes music stops in between tracks.

Any ideas?

2

I did giggle at the original typo in the title imagining Jussi reading it; (pooping sound ?) :grin:

But, more constructively, what DAC are you using and do you have another DAC that you could swap in and compare to see if this is DAC related or file/player related ?

3

Dac is a Moon 380d dsd.Only dac I have

4

Went into cross fade setting and set cross fade at 3 secs. Seems to have stopped the popping.But now when I play a 64 dsd file in source it shows dsd64 to pcm 352.4 with a green circle beside it.It then up samples to dsd 128 which is what my settings are in Hqplayer.Why does it convert the dsd file to pcm when I add cross fade ???

5

Let’s drop a flag for @brian or @mike to tell us more.

6

Also it converts from 16 bit to 24 bit while playing Tidal tracks with the green circle before passing to Hqplayer.Adding cross fade shouldn’t change anything should it ?

7

Adding crossfade = activating Roon’s DSP engine. So does turning on volume normalization.

This has a few side effects: it forces DSD->PCM conversion (because we don’t have a DSD processing engine as of now), and also losslessly expands 16bit content to 24bit to make more headroom for the ensuing DSP.

8

Reporting same or similar problem after setting ROON-HQ-SONICORE ORBITER sampling DSD256. To an OPPO-HA2.

If it is playing an album, it transitions from song to song but if I select a track or change then I get that ugly pop right at the beginning.

I don’t want to mess with the cross fade unless Brian advises to. But the pop is a blight on the system - especially at volume.

Thanks

Jonny

9

Some DACs don’t engage output mute when switching sampling rate or settings. With DSD this tends to cause pops at that point. So this is more likely to happen when “Auto rate family” is enabled.

Please observe if there is source format change when this happens and whether you have “Auto rate family” enabled…

10

Hi Jussi

Auto rate is disabled but still getting the pop if I deviate from a track, playlist or queue i.e. when I select a track.

The source format shouldn’t be changing - its all TIDAL and doesn’t happen when it’s on Radio or a Playlist. Just when I select a different track.

Best

Jonny

11

Hi Jason

Are you satisfied with where you got to - have you got DSD256? I still have that popping when I manually select a track and it’s driving me nuts.

I fear I’ll have to go back to DSD128 or PCM unless Jussi has a solution.

Best

Jon