The existing documentation on using convolution filters is woefully inadequate. As someone who has used Tact and other room correction products for many years, I was looking forward to replacing these with Roon. Right now, Roon has a long way to go to match the sophistication of products like Tact.
Where to begin? Ah yes, let’s begin with the wonderful description of how to load convolution filters onto Roon. Seems straightforward, but it’s full of gotchas as described. Let’s say I use a program to measure the impulse response of my speakers. I used Omni Mic V2 hardware and software, and generated a 32-bit WAV file, one for the left channel and one for the right channel. How does Roon know which is which? Not described in the documentation, something as elementary as this. Not very comforting. Instead, it says put all the convolution filters into a zip file, and magically, Roon will know what to use.
Of course, I tried that, and it sounded simply awful. Clearly, Roon has no clue which is the left channel and which is the right channel. There should be a clearly marked entry for loading the left channel filter and one for the right channel (more for multichannel).
More gotchas. OK, even if by some miracle, you have the filters loaded. What are you correcting for? What’s the target response curve? Again, absolutely no clue what Roon is doing with the impulse response.
My conclusion is that whoever wrote this has never used a system like Tact, and does not understand what room correction is supposed to do. There’s so much potential for improvement here, and I hope someone will fix these glaring issues in what is otherwise a stellar product.
@Sridhar_Mahadevan What exactly did you use as a filter? You talk about an impulse response. Is that what you used? I have used filters created with Audiolense since convolution was introduced in Roon. Never had any issues and sound is great.
A complete filter for convolution consists of a measurement, mic calibration to ‘eliminate’ the mic, target curve and a not insignificant calculation done by the RC program to create the filter. Stereo, mono, mch shouldn’t matter here, but remember that Roon does none of this. It must all be done in an external program. Convolution simply applies the filter you have prepared.
Yes, that’s my error in assuming Roon was in fact doing room correction, when as you say, it does none of that. Hence, my email about it not being a replacement for a software or hardware RC unit. I think the documentation could be clearer on this point.
To be more precise, Roon does the room correction at runtime, using the filters that another program has created based on measurement and calculation.
This is a handy approach: I use Acourate on a laptop to do the measurement and calculation, and I can walk into various rooms in my house and take the measurement and make the calculation, and then I can put away the laptop and mike and Roon applies the correction to each room, with no extra cost per room. It’s a different approach from conventional RC systems like Tact, consistent with Roon’s general philosophy about multi-room playback.
Btw, the filters that Acourate generated caused no trouble with left and right, they must be internally labeled, I guess.