HQPlayer
in progress
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.
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
in progress
Team Aurender
under review
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! 🙌