HQ-Player

HQ-Player

HQ-Player (HQPlayer by Signalyst) is an upsampling multichannel audio player for Windows, Mac, and Linux. With HQPlayer, users can play their favorite music through advanced digital signal processing aimed at the highest possible sound quality. HQPlayer offers a complete suite of features to enhance the listening experience, including support for a wide variety of audio formats, DSD playback, upsampling filters, convolution-based room correction, and much more.

HQ-Player provides high-fidelity audio playback with advanced upsampling and dithering capabilities for an enhanced listening experience.

Features

HQPlayer offers a wide variety of features for listeners who want to get the most out of their DAC.

Multi-Format Support: HQPlayer supports a wide variety of audio formats, including FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, MP3, DSF and DSDIFF, as well as audio CDs and M3U/PLS playlists.

DSD Playback: HQPlayer plays Direct Stream Digital (DSD) audio files natively via ASIO DSD or DoP, or converts them to PCM.

Advanced EQ and Sound Processing: HQPlayer offers parametric equalizers with minimum or linear phase, RIAA equalization and headphone cross-feed processing.

Room Correction: HQPlayer includes a convolution engine that applies FIR filters for digital room correction, for example filters created with room measurement software.

Upsampling Filters: HQPlayer offers dozens of selectable upsampling filters and delta-sigma modulators for converting music to higher sample rates.

High-Resolution Output: HQPlayer supports PCM output up to 32-bit/1.536 MHz, as well as DSD output at rates beyond DSD1024 with suitable DACs.

Native DSD Processing: HQPlayer can process DSD sources directly and modulate PCM material to DSD for DACs that perform best with 1-bit input.

User Interface: HQPlayer is operated through the HQPlayer Client, which shows track details and playback settings such as mode, filter, shaper and rate.

Customizable Playlists: HQPlayer Client lets users search the music library by artist and build playlists that can be loaded, saved and uploaded to the player.

Cross-Platform Support: HQPlayer Desktop is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

GPU Acceleration: HQPlayer can offload heavy DSP work to NVIDIA graphics cards through CUDA, adding thousands of processing cores.

Streaming Support: HQPlayer plays music from the Qobuz and HighResAudio streaming services, while other services such as Tidal can reach it through a control application like Roon.

Multichannel Processing: HQPlayer handles multichannel audio with flexible DSP pipelines for routing and mixing channels.

Network Playback: HQPlayer works as a UPnP media renderer and can stream processed audio to Network Audio Adapter (NAA) endpoints.

Integrations: HQPlayer can be controlled from third-party applications, including Roon, JPLAY and UPnP control points such as BubbleUPnP.

These are just a few of the features of HQPlayer. It is commercial software from Signalyst; without a license key it runs in trial mode for 30 minutes at a time, so you can evaluate the sound with your own DAC before buying a license.