I have an interesting finding. Remember I have been having noise issue with DSD256 on R2R7 ? I was using audirvana ---> to F1 board ---> R2R7. This has affected some R2R11 users even more with DSD 64 and 128. I then used HQ player direct mode but the noise is still there; But if I use HQ player and not use direct mode to play DSD but use the upsampling/down sampling mode though actually keep playing at same rate of DSD 256 for my native DSD files, the noise is gone!
This mode applies some digital filter like Poly-sinc, IIR etc and probably gets rid of the noise. The down side is the sound is now more sterile, and less organic. The direct mode has this noise at the beginning fo the track or on some very quiet passage or towards the end of the track but it sounds absolutely gorgeous! The piano tone is like super real and all the musicality/emotions comes out. The filtered mode sounds cleaner, lost the emotions, but more like PCM. (but I don't think it is PCM, as the HQ player shows no PCM conversion at the output, it remains in DSD 11.2896 Mhz. It is like listening to vinyl vs digital remastered CD. I read from article attached that for some silence or low signal passages of DSD track, some sort of editing is needed, if my interpretation is correct, and may make audible noise, like in "noise gating"See 2, 3.1 adnd 3.5 . Since I am no electronic/sound engineering I have little idea if this is even applicable but it appears the digital filter applied on HQ player can get rid of this noise.