Android and High-Resolution DAPs

This one seems to have the most votes:

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Awesome, thanks for finding that one. I’ll link to it off the thread I started!

If you read through all this and “understand” to some extent, then only audio saints seem to be on the road here. An “ecosystem” of people who only strive to have their hardware and software up to date to hear even the finest nuance. And OH jeh, someone does not hear it.? Does he/she not have the right ear? Or the hardware does not fit …
Of course, I did not understand any of this either.
But, and this is something I would like to emphasize here.
Roon is a lot of fun and the concept, as simple as it is, is ingenious! Without ALternative
But use multiple services and pay to enjoy the real features even with a very small music collection … for me, not an option

Of course, that’s just my limited horizon on the subject !!!
I will not renew my Roon subscription. In my personal environment and flow it is simply not profitable. I am not an audiophile. Even though I can hear differences. But I put it ultimately in my own, optimal ratio.

About the phone (DAP): it’s impressive if you can actually still make calls with it :wink:

I’m not 100% this reply was for me or the thread. Roon does a significant number of different things that enhance the audio experience. For me it #1) provides integration of a high quality digital source #2) organizes and manages offline and streaming library (almost at 17k albums - yes I have a problem) and #3) provides incredible data about my library (the day they get discogs data, I will be very very happy). So this thread is about #1 and Roon choosing to not prioritize dealing with Android properly to allow those devices to become a high quality digital source.

Agree. i just got Shangling M9 DAP and all streaming services mentioned worked, except Roon’s.
I can see it playing but no sounds. Appreciate any input on how to get Roon to work on DAP

You can get it working with LMS-to-UPNP or RooUPnP (need RPI) through Neutron Music Player in UPnP renderer mode. It’s certainly a bit of a hack, though and isn’t particularly stable.

Thanks, Richard! i’ll see if i can get it working. Hope Roon can fix this issue.

I review high-end DAPs, among other things. Whenever I post a review, this is how things go:

FiiO M17:
Someone asks “Is Roon bit-perfect with it?”
Me: “No, sorry, Roon doesn’t even output sound at all.”

Cayin N8ii:
Someone asks “Is Roon bit-perfect with it?”
Me: “No, sorry, Roon tries to re-sample everything”

FiiO M11 Plus ESS:
Someone asks “Is Roon bit-perfect with it?”
Me: “No, sorry, Roon tries to re-sample everything”

etc.

TIDAL, Qobuz and every other music player you can think of, as well as many you’ve probably never heard of have bit perfect output on these DAPs! It’s only Roon which doesn’t, and is also sometimes unable to even output music at all. I find it rather ridiculous that Roon can’t do what any regular DLNA or music app can. I believe that this needs a higher priority from the Roon developers than it has been shown.

People are happily dropping $1000-4000 on many of these devices. It’s as if Roon is near ignoring a whole market.

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Feature suggestion vote thread for bit-perfect Android. Please vote!

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PlexAmp is the same, so Roon not totally out in the wild here. But it would be great to get proper support.

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Digging up an old thread and an even older issue regarding Roon and high-end DAPs with an android operating system.

After a recent firmware update on my Shanling M9 Plus, the DAP is now showing a sample rate equivalent to the track, but is still down sampling the bit depth to 16. Has anything changed with the way Roon deals with the android o/s lately?

What tends to happen is that on these daps what is reported as the devices system rate is often dependant on what was last played not via Roon. If I start my FiiO dap for instance and fire up ARC it will upsample to the highest pcm rate the dap supports. If I play a 44.1 file from other software such as UAPP OR FiiOs own when I next play via Roon it will get the system rate is 44.1. Roon or ARC defer to what the underlying OS reports back is the default system rate and resample to it. It’s not fixed at 48/24 like Android phones as they don’t have the same interaction between dac and OS as DAPs. It’s likely they changed what the system defaults to in the firmware update.

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What I found interesting is the sample rate will now change from track-to-track. I had Roon Radio going for a specific artist, with Qobuz set as a preference for the streaming provider. Some tracks played at 44.1, some at 96, and some at 192. Prior to the Shanling firmware update the M9 Plus always displayed PCM 192 as that is the maximum for the player. You are right in that they obviously changed something with the system defaults in the update.

Not having perused all the threads on this, do we even know if Roon is working on this? It still seems crazy to me that I can’t run Roon remote on my DX320 and have it play bit perfectly - both the Tidal and Qobuz apps do it, so why can’t Roon? (I’m not even talking about ARC here, but that would be welcome too).

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I think this qualifies:

Seems like a good thing. I hope they take it further than just ARC and include the Roon Remote app on the DAP.

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Unlikely they seem focused on arc for mobile playback and lots of DAPs are moving to the Roon Ready programme so get around this and work a lot better anyway. FiiO all their range are now Roon Ready and Hiby are on the case at the moment.

Hello - I’m new to Roon, but I wanted to +1 the issue of Roon not supporting native sample rates on Android DAPs. I have a Fiio M15S DAP that I use in the office, and I was disappointed to find that Roon ARC pre-emptively resamples everything to 48KHz rather than just passing the original sample rate audio to the device.

I’ve seen a couple different discussions on this, but it really would not be hard for Roon to support these DAPs, they simply need to provide an option to disable resampling. I’ve written Android audio applications, and if you just pass the original sample rate audio to the Android AudioTrack, on a regular phone the system resamples it to 48KHz, but on DAPs which bypass the Android mixer, they will play at whatever sample rate is passed into them. I’ve seen this on HiBy and Fiio DAPs, it’s the apps that are not trying to be too “smart” and just rely on the Android audio subsystem that work best with these DAPs.

All latest FiiO daps are Roon Ready and play up to DSD256 natively this includes the M15s. So why are you not using the Roon Ready feature? Hiby are looking to move their daps to be Roon Ready also I have heard.

They have said they are looking to get ARC to support native DACs on DAPs. Arc was released too early and should have had at least another years dev time really.

Sure, I can use the Roon Ready feature when I’m at home, and it works fine, but when I’m at the office I would like to use Roon ARC.

I did try setting up a WireGuard VPN to my Roon server, and then running the Roon app and Roon Ready app on the DAP. This works (mostly), but even though I have pretty good wifi in the office I found that I would get drop outs. It would be much easier to use ARC, which is optimized for remote access.