@support. This is a clarification question really for something that has started to bug me.
What volume leveling does roon do for streamed content (Qobuz in my case)?
I have just noticed that by default roon does a “volume adjustment when loudness is unknown” = -5db. With certain types of music this really sucks the life out of it. I know that in the past I have not generally liked the roon default for LUFS adjustment either (although in recent releases this seems to have been changed to -14LUFS which in general I seem to like). I have been experiemeting with changing the default “loudness unknown” value to “no adjustment” or -1db and with certain Pop/Rock related genres I much prefer the result.
I can see on radio that my signal path for Qobuz content reflects my adjustments. So is roon doing no loudness analysis at all for streamed content?
Qobuz has begun sending us volume leveling information for the tracks they have it for, and for other tracks it’s currently being generated. This process is ongoing and they have assured us it should be done soon, although I don’t have an exact timeline yet.
For any tracks that do not have this data, the default volume leveling set in Roon will be used.
Thanks for the update. I don’t know if others realise the default loudness adjustment can have quite an effect on perceived SQ if you like using radio+streaming content. Especially for those with small local libraries, or even if you have a large local library but few or no albums for the seed artist/genre. Very worth experimenting with depending on your tastes/equipment etc. Where I have seeded with genres I don’t have much in my local library, I find switching it off altogether works better. Where I have more in my local libarary and roon radio is queing both local and streaming tracks I find a value of -1 or -2 db works better.