I recently got a Shanling M6 (2021) DAP to be my roaming-through-the-house Roon endpoint.
Shanling’s DAPs feature what they call “AGLO”, Android Global Lossless Output, I think. So I figured that I would be out from under the Android resampling problem.
But I ain’t. All the files I play through Roon are getting resampled still. But the weird thing is that they aren’t being resampled to 48; they’re being resampled to 192.
Is Android’s stack now resampling to 192? Or is Shanling’s replacement stack the one that is reporting system capabilities to Roon?
And finally, is there any good reason why Roon can’t do what Tidal has done that lets its Android app go straight through the lossless stack, ignoring the resampling stack? If I listen to an MQA file on Roon, whether it’s a 44.1 or 48 base, it all gets clobbered to 192. But the identical tracks on Tidal get properly unfolded to whatever the proper multiple is. It’s pretty freaking sad if Roon can’t manage to match Tidal’s audio performance. Roon’s supposed to be the fancy one.
Sample rate appears in Shanling’s menu bar. When Roon plays, it always reads 192. When Tidal, with the MQA files I tried so far, it reads 8x the listed sample rate of the MQA file.
Yes. It’s pretty clearly Roon that is preemptively clobbering things to 192–44.1 and 48 alike. My understanding, from reading other people’s questions, is that Roon does this with Android, because Roon will do a better job. But my understanding was that the Roon resample would be to 48. Having it be to 192 is perplexing, and I don’t know whether the DAC is receiving the first MQA unfold, like Roon delivers to any DAC, or whether it’s really just a 16/44.1 file like an MQA file should be when some non-Roon app plays it.
Roon will resample on Android based on what the system says is the rate it’s runs at…in most cases it’s 48/24 on DAPs it seems to vary somewhat dependant on the manufacturer. My Hiby is anything above 44.1/24 gets downsampled to 44.1/24 , some Fiio users it seems to be content is upsampled to 192/24 so anything goes really. You can’t use Android and get MQA unless you use Tidals app or the mqa content happens to be encoded at the base rate of the DAC, but even then it might be doing something to the bits as you can’t turn on mqa decoder for Android clients but it might pass through if your dap is a decoder and renderer.
I mean, the fact that one can get MQA using Tidal sort of indicates that this is not an insoluble problem, right? It’s just one that Roon has opted not to solve, focusing their energies on ways to repackage the Discover feature, and turn the app white.
It is a problem of Roons choosing yes. But the experience on Android prior to this was a disaster as it would skip and dropout all the time. The refactored Android playback engine fixed it but at a price of doing this. I can see why as it makes it more compatible with the majority of Android products as supporting external or all the DACs in DAPs that do odd things to negate the resampling is filled with issues. Even UAPP doesn’t work for everything. But for us that have DAPS capable of DSD playback it’s a slap in the face.