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