Totaldac is known / rewarded for their great sound quality. They outline some of the principles at: http://www.totaldac.com/principles.htm
At “4-use a digital active filter” in that page, I wonder what approach Roon is taking
What do you mean by “I wonder what approach Roon is taking”? Digital crossover implementation is possible within Roon DSP but is an uncommon use case that requires significant user intervention.
AJ
Just would love to know when Totaldac is saying
“This time the crossover in calculated digitally instead of using components. It will also be possible to use a delay line on the bass channel or on the mid/high channel to optimise the speaker impulse response, something impossible to do in active or passive analog filters.
Unfortunately most digital filters are more from computer technology with good man-machine interface software but limited jitter and analog performance, so good in theory but not so good for very high end audio, often not as good as the simple passive filter in high end speakers.”
How Roon is calculating / approaching the calculation.
This question suggests that you may be confused about Roon’s role in the system. For the most part, Roon behaves as a source component. That list of recommendations pertains to multiway speakers (i.e. speakers with multiple transducers) and some system design considerations surrounding them.
Because Roon is a source component, it isn’t generally involved in speaker crossover implementation. The only exception is if you install your own crossover filters into the DSP Engine. This is pretty advanced stuff–not many people do it, and if you were one of those people, you would know.
Many people implementing digital-domain speaker crossovers as described in (4) are using hardware-based processors. MiniDSP, Trinnov, and DEQX are examples. This is probably the kind of stuff Vincent is referring to.
A few people also implement digital crossovers in software–most commonly by installing FIR (convolution) filters. Acourate is one example of a piece of software that you could use to design such filters. You can use such filters in Roon if desired, but you’re not required to, and most people do not do this.