It depends on your PC’s horsepower and your DAC’s capabilities. You can try Jussi’s recommended poly-sinc-gauss-long (1x) and poly-sinc-gauss-hires-lp (Nx) with EC modulators.
Linear-Phase Filters:
Sinc-Lm, Poly-Sinc-Gauss-Long, and Poly-Sinc-XTR focus on accuracy, transient precision, and frequency-domain separation.
Best for critical listening and genres requiring analytical detail, such as classical or instrumental.
Minimum-Phase Filters:
Sinc-Short, Poly-Sinc-Gauss-Short, and Poly-Sinc-Gauss-HiRes-MP prioritize natural transient handling, eliminating pre-ringing for a warmer, more musical sound.
Ideal for vocals, jazz, and relaxed listening.
All-Rounders:
Filters like Poly-Sinc-Gauss-Long and Sinc-M provide a balance between precision and warmth, making them suitable for general-purpose listening across genres.
quite overwhelmed here, never thought it was so complex and this many options, I think after reading the post 8 times and compare it with the options I have in the software I am understanding
Whatever sounds best to you. First starting with HQP can be daunting since you really need to listen to every combination, imho, to get a feel for what you like. My fav settings are not what others enjoy, etc etc.
interesting… ok I would have to maybe land ‘default’ modulator for me then kind of experiment with the filters first, I think I like the echo in the poly ones
Start with 5EC super or 7EC super. Light would sound a touch sharper, brighter and analytical. UL - ultra light would sound a touch sharper, brighter and analytical than light.
5ECV3 and 7ECV3 are also quite clean and detailed, I would say maybe in between super and light
I am kind of trying to follow all you said and the developer as well, all the below are quotes from here and other sources:
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I would put things roughly this way for filters:
Minimum-phase filters for studio productions of non-classical music
Linear-phase filters for classical and other music recorded in real acoustics with minimal miking
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warmest sounding EC modulator, try DSD5EC
7ECV3 : I think sounds better than the other versions.
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Start with 5EC super or 7EC super. Light would sound a touch sharper, brighter and analytical.
UL - ultra light would sound a touch sharper, brighter and analytical than light.
5ECV3 and 7ECV3 are also quite clean and detailed, I would say maybe in between super and light
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It depends on your PC’s horsepower and your DAC’s capabilities. You can try Jussi’s recommended poly-sinc-gauss-long (1x) and poly-sinc-gauss-hires-lp (Nx) with EC modulators.
Linear-Phase Filters:
Sinc-Lm, Poly-Sinc-Gauss-Long, and Poly-Sinc-XTR focus on accuracy, transient precision, and frequency-domain separation.
Best for critical listening and genres requiring analytical detail, such as classical or instrumental.
Minimum-Phase Filters:
Sinc-Short, Poly-Sinc-Gauss-Short, and Poly-Sinc-Gauss-HiRes-MP prioritize natural transient handling, eliminating pre-ringing for a warmer, more musical sound.
Ideal for vocals, jazz, and relaxed listening.
All-Rounders:
Filters like Poly-Sinc-Gauss-Long and Sinc-M provide a balance between precision and warmth, making them suitable for general-purpose listening across genres.
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Initially, the changes seam fairly modest. There are now some more filter options, plus a new “1x” and “Nx” filter selection option, plus a few other tweaks. The 1x" and “Nx” filter selection option allows you to select different filers which are the automatically applied depending on if you are playing “hi res” material or not. So if you are playing 16/44.1 material then the 1x filter selection will apply, if you are playing 24/88.1 or higher then the Nx filter will apply.
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In HQPlayer, the “Filter 1x” setting is only applied to 44.1/48 kHz tracks and the “Filter Nx” setting is applied to all higher sample rates. So right now, I have my “Filter Nx” set to “none” and my “Sample Rate Limit” set to 96 kHz, which will only upsample 44.1/48 tracks to 88.2/96.
Yes, you need to enable the matrix processor from the top left corner, otherwise none of the settings in that dialog apply.
And there are no “presets” for DAC correction. But the “Parameter 1” being DAC selection is specific to a certain make and model. So the NEO iDSD shown is not suitable for Zen DAC v2. It is shown just because iFi uses same USB front-end implementation for all their DACs and there’s no way to knowing which specific iFi model it is. So you just get list of options to choose from. If there’s none to match exactly, don’t enable this DAC correction option at all. List of available DAC corrections is here: https://signalyst.com/dac-correction-support/
Note that this manual is pretty ancient version and shouldn’t be used anymore. HQPlayer ships with documentation relevant to a particular version. HQPlayer Desktop comes with a PDF manual, while HQPlayer Embedded comes with help pages on the web interface.
I’d say it is about 50/50 split between filters and modulators.
Modulator choice is more straightforward, while filter choice depends more fore example on source content. So once you settle with some modulator, most of the time rest is about choosing best filter for a particular case.
