@hgeifman
I started this thread over a year ago and have mentally made note of other audio upsampling options. Besides offerings from Chord and PS Audio, Lumin streamers support upscaling to DSD, Emm labs DAC upsamples to DSD. I forget what others upsample off hand.
I like watching Steve Huff’s reviews, and in this review of the Lumin U2, Huff claims to prefer Spotify streams upsampled to DSD through the Lumin over high res streams. That is quite a big claim. If I also found that I preferred Spotify streams upsampled to DSD over streams from Qobuz/Tidal, I would pretty quickly drop my Qobuz, Tidal, and Roon subscriptions. But based on my experience with upsampled DSD via HQ Player, I don’t expect to prefer upsampled DSD via Lumin to native high res PCM.
One takeaway from Huff’s video, however, was that an upsampler placed at the streamer level or farther downstream, would benefit all lossy content -- which arguably would benefit form upsampling the most. My wife and I both love Spotify and haven’t made the jump to Apple Music even though we have Apple devices. Although Apple Music contains high res content, I don’t like Apple Music’s policy of deleting my saved music, artists, and playlists if I ever take a hiatus from it’s subscription.
Regarding HQ Player, I found HQ Player to be a laggy and a clunky experience generally. I wasn’t a fan of waiting 5 seconds for music to begin. Sometimes I would press play and nothing would happen. I used HQ Player to see if DSD was something I would get into, but I preferred the sound of PCM to (upsampled) DSD on my system. And, when I used HQ Player to upsample CD quality tracks from Tidal into high res, I ended up preferring those filters that sounded the same as CD quality streamed from Tidal through Roon.
I never did get around to installing HQ Player onto a computer to sit between the Roon Core and streamer, which may solve the inconsistent experience or reduced lag. I also haven’t installed HQ Player on an M-chip Apple device to see if that removed lag as someone claimed. HQ Player allowed me to experiment with my system and get a taste for (upsampled) DSD. I also found it fascinating how different filter/dither options in HQ Player could alter the sound.