HQPlayer
planned
A
Anonamemouse
I would really like to see Aurender team up with HQPlayer for the absolute best possible sound quality.
Roon is fun for the pointless connection to all sorts of info many of us are not interested in. Roon also does not sound as good as the Aurender engine itself. It's eye candy at best.
I bought my Aurender player for the excellent sound and build quality. I think this can be improved even more with HQPlayer.
T
Tom Mathews
Why can Conductor sound better than Roon if everything is bit-perfect? Fair question. Here's my best answer.
Conductor, Roon, JPlay, GentooPlayer, Audirvana: set up correctly, they all deliver identical bits to the DAC. When someone hears a difference, it's one of four things.
1. Roon isn't bit-perfect in that setup. MUSE is a DSP engine. Volume leveling, headroom management, crossfade, any filter: if one is on, Roon recalculates every sample. Check the signal path light. Purple is lossless. This explains more "Roon sounds worse" reports than anything technical.
2. The path is different. Conductor copies the track to the Aurender's SSD cache and plays it locally with one lean process Aurender tuned. Roon Ready streams in real time from the Core into a separate endpoint process on the Aurender. More traffic, more CPU activity, a different buffer. The bits match; the electrical activity inside the box doesn't. That's where the honest debate lives.
3. The server is in the chain. With Conductor, the source is the Aurender. With Roon, it's also the Core and the switch between them. JPlay and GentooPlayer attack this from the other side by making the computer as quiet as possible. Aurender solved it in hardware.
4. Sighted listening. Almost none of these comparisons are level-matched and blind. The gap is just smaller than the forum makes it sound.
HQPlayer is different in kind. Every player above tries to deliver the same bits with as little noise around them as possible. HQPlayer is the only one that changes the signal on purpose. It upsamples PCM up to DSD1024, applies convolution filters, and uses a modulator that pushes the noise created in the DSD conversion far above human hearing. What's left is the music and a background about as black as digital gets. That's why people call it the most analog-sounding digital they've heard.
And it works alongside the others. Roon feeds it natively. JPlay and other UPnP apps feed HQPlayer Embedded in renderer mode. GentooPlayer can host HQPlayer and the NAA on one machine. The heavy math runs on the server; the Aurender stays the quiet, clock-disciplined box at the end of the line.
That's what NAA 6 support in Conductor would be. Not a replacement for Aurender's engine. One more choice, for the listener who wants the most analog-sounding music and the blackest background, on the endpoint that already does quiet better than anyone. The plug-and-play owner never sees it. The rest of us get the option.
Artur Karbinski
Good morning,
Do you have an approximate date for when HQplayer support will be added?
I think a lot of people are waiting for this, and adding this feature could certainly boost sales of your device. I have a friend who wanted to buy the Aurender N200 but ended up buying the Innous Stream3 because it supports HQplayer.
Best regards
Marc Heijligers
i see this one has been demoted from "in progress" to "planned". What happened?
A
Anonamemouse
Marc Heijligers apparently there are all so busy that nobody has a few minutes left to reply to comments or answer questions...
Artur Karbinski
I asked a question too, and got no response. Maybe they don't give a damn about us because we already have their devices.
Marc Heijligers
Artur Karbinski Or they are simply very busy to support customers that have acute problem? Aurender is a relative small company, and I think they have underestimated the amount of effort it takes to maintain such a complex software package. I see their release note pages are also lagging.
When you buy an Aurender, you buy the device as it is at that day. Any additional support, like making an existing device ROON compatible, or adding whatever feature is a free gift to the existing customer base. In that sense I think they do care about us (and their competitive status in the market).
But I would agree on just sending a small note, makes a difference to building a solid customer base, but this is their decision to take.
Artur Karbinski
Marc Heijligers I think that one person from Team Aurender could answer all the questions users have been asking in just a few hours. It just takes a little effort... there aren't that many questions.
Team Aurender
updated the status to
planned
L
Laurence C.
While I am not commenting/voting against HQPlayer endpoint capability (you'd use their NAA protocol, right?), I am pointing out that the value that Aurender brings is the
ease
with which we get Aurender's outstanding sound quality. I connect it and turn on critical listening mode, DONE. HQPlayer is great for people who want to fiddle and discover their DAC's optimal sample rate or optimal conversion or whatever. You have to have a fairly high degree of computer literacy to even get into all the things that make an HQPlayer computer and configuration functional. Personally, I'd rather spend the time listening to music! And now there are reports of a protocol called Diretta (not to mention Ravenna) as well as JPlay...
My request is to please provide "advanced" capabilities for users of all types to utilize the power of an Aurender computer as the source for their DACs. And, please preserve the "plug and play" world-class audio quality you've become known for. Thanks for reading and for having this forum for feedback!
Marc Heijligers
The Aurender itself delivers high-quality streaming output. It’s clear that native playback via Conductor sounds better than ROON, which demonstrates the strength of your implementation!
Why HQPlayer:
- Some DACs perform better at higher sample rates. For example, the high cut-off filter in my Ayre DAC works more effectively at an oversampled rate than at 44.1kHz. Upsampling improves overall sound quality, emphasizing system synergy rather than focusing on individual components.
- ROON’s slightly lower sound quality (not Aurender specific!) can also be compensated through local re/up-sampling on the playback device. We have heard instances of that, e.g. make ROON sound similar to for instance JPlay after applying HQ-player to ROON.
The challenge, of course, is to maintain sound quality without degradation due to CPU load, memory/cache-miss interactions or homogeneous USB-packet-based traffic, so I can understand the implementation of HQPlayer on an Aurender is not straightforward if you want to make it an improvement.
Team Aurender
updated the status to
in progress
A
Anonamemouse
Team Aurender
Good day to you all!
It's been quite a while since this (my) request was posted, is there any update?
Also, it's been even longer since we had a major firmware update. Are there plans to roll one out in the (near) future?
R
Robert Kunen
I own the N20 and agree that when I bought it, none of the Roon solutions could match the sound quality of my N20. But since I tested GentooPlayer, using a RAM drive configuration, it was nearly impossible to tell my N20 and Roon apart. Not sure if HQPlayer integration will improve Aurender, and even if HQPlayer beats GentooPlayer.
Team Aurender
Robert Kunen:
I really appreciate you sharing these detailed observations about sound performance comparisons! 🙌
L
Laurence C.
Team Aurender - Mr. Kunen makes a great point, and I think that Aurender has to know whom your products are most appealing to, which includes people like me who want to minimize the computer skills and who want your products to be as simple as possible, along with the tech support you are known for.
While I have the background to dig into things like Rasp. Pi and streamers which allow a choice of software, I
don't
want to do that! As an audio consumer, I want plug and play and I want to pay for the value of the well designed hardware and software integration
your products provide because they deliver extremely high sound quality. Without getting into my beliefs as to why one thing sounds "better" than another, I appreciate that your team is interested in the admittedly subjective quality your approach brings over other solutions. And, as I posted earlier, that your solution is more plug-and-play while also allowing more sophisticated users to utilize their approaches to sound quality.