Maybe I’m doing something wrong but tried out hqplayer via Roon set up on my Mac mini, with Innuos Zen mk3 as NAA endpoint. My Qutest was showing the upsampling working but SQ was significantly worse than playing the same file direct from the Innuos Zen in normal mode (at a lower sampling rate). It wasn’t a small difference either! Is it worth persevering with different settings or is it just the Zen is much better as a player on its own? Thanks! It’s the Sygnalyst HQPlayer I was using.
Maybe Innuos OS is still applying their own digital filter, which would conflict with what HQ Player is doing, not sure though. Ask on the Innuos community.
The Mac mini may not be sufficiently powerful to run roon and HQPlayer ‘quietly’ - the area of dynamic upscaling is a ‘rabbit hole’ and there are other forums with members expanding their equipment to get this approach to work with individual enhanced computers/processors, or by buying dedicated audio servers.
Another approach, applied by some MScaler users, is to scale back the upscaling to just 2x or 4x the source material.
Part of the purpose of upscaling is to take the processor load off the DAC itself, e.g. the Qutest, where the DAC design itself upsamples the incoming stream as part of its own processing (where it is designed to do so).
The Audiostore may have a solution for you..
Great thank you, that’s helpful. I was surprised at how different the SQ was - it’s a fairly powerful Mac which can run a bunch of plugins on Logic without breaking a sweat, so would be surprised if it was a cpu issue. But will try reducing it a bit to see if that makes a difference. It’s curiosity more than anything. Appreciate the steer.