HQ Player is a third party software upsampling program that can bypass the upsampling in low and mid priced DACs to good effect. Using a general purpose computer to perform upsampling and modulation rather than the constrained computing resources in a DAC has improved SQ in the opinion of many Roon users (myself included).
Roon can be integrated as a front end to HQ Player.
HQ Player can send Output to its own “thin client” network player, called a Network Audio Adaptor, or NAA. This has similar advantages to using Roon Ready or Roon Bridge with Roon.
Unfortunately Auralic have chosen not to implement an NAA in the Aries, meaning HQ Player users look to other devices like the microRendu, SonicOrbiter or a Small Computing Device like a Raspberry Pi to act as an NAA.
I’ve drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid and use HQP to upsample everything to DSD 512 before sending it over Ethernet to a microRendu and then to a non oversampling resistor ladder DSD DAC, the Holo Audio Spring.