Windows 10 Home (Version 1903, OS build 18362.592)
Roon Version 1.7 (build 511) stable (64bit)
HQPlayer 4 Desktop version 4.3.0
Description Of Issue
Dear Roon,
Ever since the latest update (I think since Roon sends 64bit floats to HQPlayer when convenient) quite a few songs will not play in HQPlayer if I’m also using the Audeze Reveal presets for my LCD-i4. Roon/HQPlayer will just skip the track without any warning.
Everything works fine if I’m not using HQPlayer. And everything also works fine if I just disable the DSP presets even if I’m using HQPlayer. It’s just this combination that seems to reproduce this error.
Here’s a list of a few songs (from Tidal) that wouldn’t play in the scenario that I mentioned:
Weirdly enough, the first song (Stronger by DeathbyRomy) would play just fine once I switched from the Audeze low-latency filter to the Linear filter. And now, even after switching back to the low-latency filter, the song plays just fine. Maybe the filters have nothing to do with it, but this seems to indicate that there could be another parameter involved with this issue. I couldn’t reproduce this “fix” with the other songs in that list though.
I think the next step here is to enable some diagnostics on your account so our technical staff can get some more insight into what’s going on here.
However, before I enable this feature, I’d like to ask for your help ensuring we gather the right information.
First, can you please reproduce the issue once more and note the time at which the error occurs. Then respond here with that time, and I’ll make sure we review the diagnostics related to that timestamp.
Now that I have the timestamps, diagnostics have been enabled on your account. The next time your Core is active a diagnostics report will automatically be generated and uploaded directly to our servers
Once that’s been received, I’ll be sure to update this thread and pass the diagnostics over to the team for further analysis.
Hi @dylan, I let my core core machine play all day with the configuration that causes this problem. Hope that gives you guys enough data to work out what the issue is. I will use this zone for other uses (as well) from now on if you don’t mind.
What I’ve noticed myself, is that sometimes the same song will play with this configuration, but it’s never a consistent result.
Hope we can figure this out. Thanks again for all the support.
Thanks for the update, @Arash. The team has reviewed the diagnostics report and is now moving on to some testing in our QA labs with a similar setup. I’ll be sure to reach out with their feedback once they’ve completed their testing.
I met with the team to discuss their findings. In all cases they were able to get this setup working. It looks like you’re running into a performance issue here when trying to use the Audeze DSP presets with HQ Player — The main thing that they note is using these processes can be a bit resource intensive, and your Core machine falls a bit under what we recommend. If you have another machine that does meet our requirements we recommend giving this a try on that machine and let us know if that works for you.
That’s a bit odd, since I never had any performance issues before. But if you say so… I’ll consider upgrading sometime in the future. Thanks for the support. I really appreciate it. And I apologize for troubling you and your team.
If possible, I’d like to re-open the following topic:
I figured out what the parameters are for a song to fail playing: It’s when the file sample rate and/or bitrate change from song to song. that’s when the song wouldn’t play. But if you then try to play a song in that sample rate again (meaning: the second try), then the song always plays fine.
The same happens when using any kind of DSP in conjunction with HQPlayer.
Also, I figured out that turning the DSP on while playing a song always results in successful playtime.
Can we still say this is a performance issue? Or should we look further into this?
Hope we can work this out. Thanks again for the great support.
That’s an interesting observation, it sounds like HQPlayer and/or the Audeze LCD is having difficulty switching between sample rates. Does this only occur on your Audeze LCD-i4 zone through HQPlayer or does it occur on any zone with DSP active?
In the interim while we troubleshoot this, you may want to set Roon to upsample all of your content to the Max PCM rate in the DSP Engine:
It also happens when using any parametric EQ for example.
This works! It even seems to work when set to “Max PCM rate (Power of 2)”, which is interesting by itself, since that would suggest that the problem isn’t necessarily within the switching of sample rates, but just related to it. It kinda seems like the order of the process is being handled incorrectly when just switching between 1x and 2x rates (The Dragonfly Cobalt only goes up to 96kHz in this scenario).
Thanks for the great support, @noris . Really appreciate it
Using the “Custom” Sample Rate Conversion option, I’ve done some more tests. It seems that playback is always successful when Roon does any oversampling (like to 176.4/192kHz). The same goes for downsampling (88.2/92kHz downsampled to 1x).
Thanks for the additional info @Arash. Let me discuss with our hardware team to see if they can provide some more info regrading this behavior and if they have the gear to try to reproduce in-house.
Does it occur on any other HQPlayer zone (if you have one)? That would also be an interesting data point.
I have a NAD C658 DAC, but it’s connected through Roon’s network and sadly, I have no way to connect it to my source directly right now. So, no other DACs here to test it with, I’m sorry.
I couldn’t reproduce this “fix” with the other songs in that list though.
