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This is the "Performance" tab in Windows 10 Task Manager when playing back 24/96 PCM as DSD512 using "poly-sinc" oversampling and the "AMSDM7 512" modulator. To give you an idea of processing demands, when doing realtime PCM-to-DSD conversion, this is what the CPU/GPU utilization looks like: Remember, as discussed, there's no need to worry about "noise" with GPU and CPU's many feet away from my DAC. HQPlayer is processing-hungry and I included the nVidia GTX 1080 GPU above since this is significant as HQPlayer allows one to offload much of the DSD conversion to the GPU which I activated for these tests. Remember I used various off-line PCM-to-DSD conversion tools and realtime JRiver 24 in that previous post, so feel free to compare. Notice the setup is the same as the recent Oppo UDP-205 DSD playback post - using my Intel i7-3770K computer at stock 3.5GHz base speed up to 3.9GHz Turbo, 16GB DDR3 RAM Windows 10 PC.
Hqplayer key pro#
Intel i7-3770K CPU + nVidia GTX 1080 GPU Windows 10 computer -> 16' generic USB -> Oppo UDP-205 as DAC -> generic 6' XLR -> RME ADI-2 Pro FS ADC -> generic USB -> Win 10 i5 measurement laptop For the tests today here is the general hardware set-up: The demo will run for 30 days, but 30 minutes at a time - enough time to try out, listen and run samples through the audio analyzer to get an idea of what it's doing. The tests today are done with a recent version of HQPlayer - 3.25.2 available as a demo (I see that there is now a 3.25.3 build available at the time of publication). Well, after all these years, and now with the requisite pieces of hardware at my disposal for a more thorough evaluation (reasonably fast CPU/GPU system, ADC capable of >192kHz, DAC capable of DSD512), it's time to have a peek "under the hood" at what it does. In fact, back in early 2017 when I wrote about Roon 1.2, I mentioned installing HQPlayer but never got around to actually writing about it. It has certainly been on my list of items to look into. In this way, HQPlayer has been a bit of a mystery and I know some folks have had difficulty getting it running over the years. While admittedly I don't follow HQPlayer chatter closely, I don't recall reading about specific settings and what they do other than opinions about the sound quality. There has been a good amount of talk about the sound quality of the upsampling algorithms and some swear by the sonic differences the program makes. While there is a GUI for playback as well as a sophisticated network transport architecture, it's the upsampling and PCM-to-DSD features that are the program's claim to fame.
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Over the years, no doubt many computer audio users have heard or perhaps tried using HQPlayer Desktop from Signalyst for music playback.