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.
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
in progress
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.