I’ve been seeing what seems to be the same issue on my setup.
I’m a recent Roon Yearly subscriber running my Roon Core on a QNAP NAS.
I have been tinkering a bit with settings, and for the time being it seems like turning on “Headroom management” with a reduction of 3dB in the digital signal processing (DSP), fixes the issue.
I don’t see why this should be necessary, however, as I’ve not turned on any other sorts of processing.
Roon seems to be doing bit depth conversion, even though I haven’t got it turned on.
Thank you for your post and for your patience in awaiting an official staff response to your issue.
I’ve split your post into a dedicated topic thread for discussion, as the thread to which you’d previously replied concerned a previous version of Roon.
If you’re hearing clipping or popping that you can resolve by enabling headroom management, it’s possible that there’s clipping in your signal path producing audible distortion.
Do you have any custom settings in your audio drivers on this PC?
If you enable the Clipping Indicator in Headroom Management and set it to a lower value (like -1.00dB), do you see the clipping indicator turn red?
Does this occur with any Zones in Roon other than your PC system output? Can you reproduce the issue on multiple sets of speakers?
Without Headroom adjustment, do you experience this issue with any particular content source or filetype? For instance, only Tidal content, or only a particular sample rate?
Roon’s DSP engine will perform volume adjustment in 64-bit float to avoid losing quality in the audio stream during internal calculation. See this post for a more precise explanation: Bit depth up then down - #6 by danny
