Achieving Lossless Sound

REW was easy but the results were bad. Worse than uncorrected, I would not use it. I was not surprised — I am no expert but I have always believed that looking at amplitude response only is no good. The transfer function is a complex function (complex in the mathematical sense, it has two dimensions), and looking at only amplitude and ignoring phase is like saying, to get from Chicago to New York you drive 800 miles, which direction? Never mind, just drive 800 miles.

I didn’t try anything else, because I had a strong recommendation for Acourate from a friend whose engineering sense I respect, a development manager at Microsoft I worked with.

I wasn’t really difficult. Just rolling up my sleeves. I consider Mitch’s book essential:


The project took a few days, maybe a week, of dedicated time.
Once I have learned it, I have done other rooms in an hour or two (including finding the mic).

The software is not bad, the reason I and others talk about the learning curve is that it is a rich tool kit that can do many things. I didn’t want to learn everything audio, just wanted to do this, Mitch’s book led me through it. Would have taken less time if I had followed the instructions from the beginning and not tried to take shortcuts — it’s a guy thing.

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Thanks @AndersVinberg. I have the book too. I’ll dive in! Appreciate the feedback!

Try this!: Roon Settings > Audio > Networked / Airplay > Marantz SR7012 > Disable!
Only “High Quality” works here with Airplay! Use cable.

You may be able to get this on kindle unlimited as well for those with a sub.

I’ve got a Brooklyn Bridge with an SBooster linear psu, and with my ears/room/system, I get zero improvement using Roon to upsample. The system sounds magnificent just using Roon to deliver content. If your NAS has the horsepower to run Roon without any filters, you might be able to redistribute your budget and go for a BB or something similar and save the cost of a NUC.

Thank you everyone for the suggestions! I ended up ordering the Digione signature which will arrive next week and plan to purchase the lifetime subscription of Roon.

I also just learned that Hegel is going to make their newer integrated amps (H190 and H390) Roon Ready by the end of 2019, so I may go purchase one of those in the coming weeks and HT bypass it to the Marantz.