Hi @mike, all,
Prompted by another thread where someone suggested behaviour of Roon on an LG V35 would recently have changed, I started experimenting a bit. I didn’t notice anything new / different on my LG V30 (running Android 8.0.0) , but then, out of curiosity, turned the Private Zone setting to ‘No’, and played around with Sample Rate Conversion settings (under DSP).
Perhaps of interest when this ticket is actively looked at by the Roon team, the issue of immediate severely distorted sound when Roon is not in focus on my LG V30 seems to disappear when setting sample rate conversion to 48kHZ - this seems to hold for each sample rate (44.1, 48, 88.2, 96 and 192kHz) and bit depth (16 or 24) for which I have tracks to test with, as well as a poor, lonely DSD128 track.
Previously everything was set to ‘DEFAULT’. Now, with conversion to 48kHz I cannot identify any difference between playback with Roon in or out of focus. Opening, closing, using other apps or activating battery saver settings also seems to have no further detrimental effect.
Conversion to other rates (including 96kHZ) does not give the same ‘improvement’; also setting allowed Max Sample Rate to 96kHZ or bit depth to 24bits (under device settings) has no discernible effect. on my device.
I wonder if others notice same? I will tomorrow also try this out on a Lenovo tablet which has shown similar behaviour.
For what it is worth … and apologies if I am not saying anything new - I failed to pick up anything alike from a quick search on the forum.
Note: sound remains far from satisfactory: whether Roon is in our out of focus, there are frequent audible artefacts (crackling, like playing damaged vinyl), but the further deterioration when backgrounding Roon seems to disappear. (And of course only the android mixer is available 
, not the separate and better path via the ESS Sabre DAC, but that is a different matter)
Screenshots of settings below.
Private Zone off:
Sample rate conversion to 48kHZ for all rates available in my library:
