Playback Design MP-3 and MP-5 DSD 128 and 256 The list of DAC’s with which we have tested and found that HQ Player significantly improves the sound of Redbook by either upsampling to a higher PCM rate or format conversion for DSD DAC’s has grown considerably since the introduction of Closed From filter and the XTR family of filters over the past year
today that is likely Windows 10 and HQ Player, but what might it be tomorrow? is your hardware (and supporting company) capable and motivated to be agile enough to move forward when it's proper to do so? because the one thing we can count on is change.
because your hardware should be capable to shifting to whatever software might be best at feeding your dac. When we go to invest in a digital direction, to me it's not 'HQ Player' or not?.it's more Ethernet or not. I also enjoy feedback from others some of who lean toward the Ethernet approach, and then still others who seem to prefer streaming and MQA. and I've spent enough listening time with him in my system to know how he listens. whether we agree or not with his viewpoint, he has done the work to speak about this as much as anyone.
I could not begin to list the dozens and dozens of personal investigations he has talked to me about.including many/most of the various digital products we have all read about or heard. Personally I've liked the feedback I've received from Eurodriver who has traveled the world doing digital comparisons with and without the SGM server.
only a series of anecdotal feedback events one can try and take something useful from. There are no absolutes in ranking digital audio performance. I find that you lose soundstage with upsampling but get better imaging. Similar to upsampling a dvd to HD, all it does is shrink the picture to make what you do see higher definition at the tradeoff of less picture real estate. It doesn't improve it in any implementation I have heard it in. To me 'upsampling" it is a marketing term attributed to quality, but all it does is change the sound. Same with noise and other functions that greatly improve the sq with using a DAC. You can also measure the jitter and see if your computers own software performs better at eliminating it without the need for the external dac. If we are speaking strictly software, without regard to hardware, then you can answer that by trying HQ player and just upsampling any of your own music through your audio system to see what difference upsampling makes. If you were to take into account a single variable outside of software, say the power supply design of a computer vs a dac, you would see the significance of dacs and dac design vs any laptop running hq player. The general direction of the questioning is in line with software being somehow responsible for the entirety of the quality of audio obtained from the music played back through it.