Thanks. Your synthesis of personal experience is quite eye-opening and incredibly useful to an HQP newbie. I’m now checking the interface carefully to see exactly what is being applied during playback. Have not yet understood why sometimes it’s “Oversampling 1x” and other times “Oversampling Nx” that is applied during PCM conversion. Certain filters when associated with “Oversampling Nx” seem to prevent tracks from playing at all. For example I can have “sinc-LI” on 1x no problems, but on Nx playback (in Roon) hangs.
My headphones are electrostatic (Stax SR-L700 Mk2) and I’ll bet they are quite good (frequency response 7Hz – 41kHz) at some of these inaudible frequencies that seem to have been giving me discomfort. I wish there were a warning it the manual about this: I would have stopped each time my instincts told me something was wrong.
Browsing relentlessly found the following post: Which HQP Filter are you using? [2024] - #249 by jussi_laako
In which it is said that “Both, too leaky filters, and also the long filter ringing gives me “digitus”, which is listening fatigue after a while. This is usually worst when combined with metal dome tweeters that have 20+ dB resonance peak around 25 kHz or so. In worst case I get tinnitus from that.” Don’t understand all that is being said there but it seems the blame is squarely with the Filter and not the Modulator.
It seems to be totally unacceptable to be getting tinnitus (hearing damage, basically: hearing cell death) from listening at modest volumes because of high energy ultrasonic waves. Can we not find a technical solution for this?
Btw. do you have a shortcut system for importing settings according to repertoire? Or go into settings and do it manually each time? I should think that setting Preset Buttons in HQP would be a popular request.