Airplay sound quality

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hi - so I’m freshly setup. Loving the Roon meta data, but disappointed with the sound quality.

I have my Roon Core setup on a pc in my study. In my bedroom I have a new Devialet Phantom Gold. When I stream straight from Tidal to the Devialet the sound is really pretty good.

But trying some of my own lossless files from Roon I can hear the compression. It seems Roon is using AirPlay to get to the Devialet. Is Airplay causing the deteriation in sound qualiy? Apparently it’s meant to support lossless.

Is there any other way to get to the speaker other than Airplay?

Or any other suggestions to improve the sound quality?

If this is the end result of using Roon I would (disappointedly) cancel before the 14 day trial is up. But surely it should be able to sound better than this? What am I missing?

Thanks,
Mark

2

Do you have any DSP, volume leveling or crossfeed turned on in Roon? It might help if you could post the signal path like the following.

signal%20path
signal path.PNG394×571 36 KB

3

Thanks. I’d love to. Where do i find this option in the menus .Can’t find it.Thanks

4

Ah, found something. Not quite your screen above. But it does say DSP enabled.Still
looking for the signal path

5

http://kb.roonlabs.com/Signal_Path

6

To avoid Airplay on your Phantom (until the long promised RAAT compatibility arrives) you’ll need to leverage the Optical input on the Phantom with some sort of Roon endpoint. I have a Raspberry Pi, with a Hifiberry Digi+ hat on it (which gets me a quality optical/toslink out), running DietPi as an OS with the Roon Endpoint software installed. That gets me around AirPlay, and allows me to listen to higher res music without the downsampling that Airplay applies.

That’s a DIY solution to a problem you could also solve with an Aurelic Aries Mini, or something similar, albeit more costly.

Devialet have promised RAAT compatibility to its Expert line first, then I believe to the Reactor line, and then eventually to the larger Phantom models some time in (probably late) 2019. Until then, this is the stop-gap solution.

7

Thank you!

8

Thanks. I actually have an Auralic Altair arriving this week for the lounge (going into my ATC amp and SCM40s) so will be interesting to see how that sounds.

For the Devialet for the bedroom, I was partly after a ‘simple’ solution…! :wink:

If the Roon works well and sounds good in the lounge setup, that will be enough to justify staying with it. For the Devialet I might just leave Roon out and stream straight from Tidal/Qobuz over WiFi, which is working fine.

My bigger problem right now is that my iOS apps keep losing connection to my Roon Core, so I’ve hardly been able to use it since last night anyway!

I’ll,pick that up in another thread.

Thanks again for the tips.

9

Hi - just to come back to you, my signal path is much simpler than yours above. But this is what I have:

image
image.png762×516 33 KB

Might be my imagination, but it seems to be sounding better today than yesterday…! :wink:

10

I have been using a pair of Devialet Golds and Dialog with roon for a least a year. I have compared to using the Spark app or Tidal or Qobuz via Bluetooth and feel sure it sounds as good or better than the alternatives. Make sure you using PLC to connect the gold to the dialog because counter-intuitively you will get the most stable and best sound.

11

Thank you for this feedback. Having just got the one, I have been thinking about making a stereo pair of it…but perhaps a bit much (cost-wise) just for the bedroom! Would like to try it out though…

That’s encouraging that you find the sound as least as good, although it comparing to Bluetooth then I would argue that’s a lower bar, that I’d like to get above. So the Spark app (which should be straight lossless over wifi, no bluetooth), is what I’ll compare to.

For some reason, when I woke up this morning I couldn’t get any airplay/wifi connection fo the Devialet, even though the wifi was fine for all my other devices. Not sure what that’s about, but I’ve had to leave it and come to work now. Will do battle again when I get home…:wink:

Thank you.