HQPlayer has a remote control, HQPD control, that sweetens a bit, I stress a bit, its unbelievably spartan looking UI!
I found Neutron had quite a “beefy” sound which could match well with light sound systems. Personally, I found it a touch too much & the sound stage became very odd in place. King Ghost from The Future Bites by Stephen Wilson, the main focals are centre stage with second vocals from left & right. Neutron placed the main vocals on the right.
1 Like
You were posting in different threads that you were playing through Wasa.
I don’t listen to it with a light system, but with Audeze LCD-2 headphones.
It’s also possible that you did not configure correctly this dam complex player. It has endless settings.
Tried HQPlayer last night, aside from it not loading many of my files, it seems to only want to play certain bitrates - is that correct? -, I don think I noticed any difference in SQ, but then A.3.5 sounds so good on my system that’s no surprise. Maybe slightly more emphasis on very top end, which added nothing to the listening pleasure.
HQP does not play all the formats.
I’m not sure you configured it correctly.
What formats did you play and with what settings?
I didn’t bother checking. Just found an album it would load and tested with that. I didn’t spend much time on it as I have no interest in paying so much for a music player.
1 Like
Especially as A3.5 is set up and sounding so good, I’m happy.
1 Like
As I said already, this player is a derivate of a professional application that is used by sound engineers to master our CDs, SACDs, and Hi Ress. It’s not a substitution to iTunes, and it’s not a consumer software like Audirvana or Room.
It has very powerful features for playback, and it necessitates careful settings.
It’s made for people who want a studio quality playback.
Which without studio quality equipment in a studio quality room, you’re not going to get…
1 Like
Thereare audiophiles who have better Hi Fi than I do.
However, even on my Hi Fi it sounds great. But I listen a lot with headphones.
I know what it is… way too complex for non audio techies.
Who, like me, just wanjt something that sounds great out of the box, which A.3.5 ( and to a slightly lesser extent, AS ) does.
Remain with what makes you happy.
But if you check a player, do it seriously.
This player produces an analog like sound. But it’s not a consumer product.
WASAPI on Audirvana & Foobar, I’m not entirely sure the mode I was using on Neutron. Other tracks did not have the placement weirdness, although they did have the rich overlay to the sound. To be fair, I did not see that as a negative, but it didn’t work too well with my Mojo & 1840 headphones. Neuton is by no means bad, it’s right up there, I just felt that AS (& Foobar to a lesser extent), work better on my system & to my preferences. The Neutron UI however is a true nightmare. No effort seems to have gone into the UI at all. After my testing, the UI irritated me to the extent that I was pleased to uninstall it.
Now that I have found that OGG compatibility was causing my main issue, I will stick with AS for FLAC & use Foobar for my OGG library.
I warned you that the UI is awful. But the sound is really great, if you take the time to understand how the player functions, where are the settings and how you can check that you configured it as you wanted.
In the beginning, I was completely lost. After a day or two, I became used to it. But though I use it for about 3 weeks already, I still find features that ignored.
I play my own music, and the most important thing for me is the sound quality. All the other aspects of a player, complexity, ease of use, even bugs that may affect AS, are of secondary importance for me.
EDIT
And it will play your OGG files. It plays everything.
I have Neutron on my android and tbh barely use it, just because I find it too clunky to navigate. I am also sure I have barely scratched the surface of what it can do. From what I remember the sound was pretty good.
I didn’t realise there was a windows version, so trying out now. One album I have been comparing with Roon (because not loaded it on AS yet) and I found Roon to be superior. Straight out the box Neutron sounded a bit muffled to me in comparison to Roon, although I think it was said upstream that you had to fiddle with settings. If I get time later will play about with settings to get the best out of it. In general I find that I can barely tell the difference between players like AS, Roon or even Qobuz and Tidal native apps. They all sound pretty great to me, with perhaps minute differences such as some sound louder or perhaps a bit more forward. Normally that can be fixed by playing about with settings. My equipment would probably be classed as “seriously audiophile” by the 99% of the public who are not audiophiles, but not as “seriously audiophile” by genuinely serious audiophiles lol. I think when you have decent equipment it becomes harder to say which music player is superior to the rest, assuming the players are up to scratch in the first place. That’s just my case though, each and everyone of us will have a different experience.
I’ll end things by saying if Doudou says Neutron is a good player, it will probably be a good player 
Edit - another thing I should say is only 5 -10% of my listening each week is on headphones, I probably listen to music through speakers for 5 or 6 hours per day. I think it’s probably easier to hear the difference in sound quality between players if you were to listen on headphones.
Easy to convert those ogg format to flac without lost.
The most important thing that you should do with Neutron is to make sure that it recognized your ASIO driver, and that it outputs to it and not to Wasa.
Once it’s done, just set it io bit-perfect, and you will already have a very good sound. The tuning of the other settings can be done later. If for instance you want to upsample or if you want to output your PCMs to DSD 128.
1 Like
Thanks, which converter would you suggest please? I’m a little wary of free stuff.
I would have said XLD on the Mac side… but since you are on PC, i’ll let some else answer this 
1 Like
Format Factory