I have two Devialet phantoms in a stereo pair. Unfortunately, they only play in airplay, since they are only roon tested, and not (yet) roon ready, so they don’t support RAAT. I wonder if any features of the DSP engine, like upsampling, would make the sound any better?
In another room I have a Bluesound powernode, which plays hi res and MQA, according to the signal path. Could upsampling improve the sound quality?
I have no separate roon core (yet), and use my recent imac, on which I installed roon server. I seldomly use the imac for other things. Would the imac be strong enough if I use the DSP features?
Unpopular opinion, I’m sure: don’t do anything unless you understand what and why, but start with the “why”. Is there a perceived quality issue? If so, identify it clearly and quantify it, for example, by performing room measurements, then devising a compensating EQ, then measuring and listening again.
Making from 16 bits 24 at the end of the Roon signal path will not help with anything except perhaps a lack of network congestion
Enjoy the music, Luk!
The only way to find out is to try. As Airplay only supports up to 48kHz you’d have to feed your Phantoms from a Roon bridge supporting 192kHz on Toslink. Cheap here is a Raspberry 3B+ (or 4) with a HAT. The other (better) end could be a Mutec MC-3 +USB. You could then try Roon’s upsampling. Other than that, DLNA which Roon does not support (but sounds good with Phantoms) or wait for RAAT on Phantoms. If you try any of this, make sure your iMac is cabled to your network. Wifi often gives trouble on higher sample rates.
In the Roon user manual available online there’s advice about use of the DSP engine in Roon. One reason they give for not using it is that you’ve paid for an endpoint which includes upsampling functionality and they make the point that the designers of such endpoints are in the best position to handle upsampling in the best way for their particular device.
I don’t have Phantoms, I’ve got an Expert Pro which upsamples everything to 192/24 anyway. I’ve compared having Roon upsample everything to 192/24 to having Roon stream everything in bit perfect mode which is at whatever resolution the original source file is, and I do not hear a difference. As a result I simply let my Devialet do the upsampling.
As Ogs said, the only way to find out is to try but I think you’re going to have to go to a fair bit of trouble and possibly expense to upsample your music prior to streaming it to your Phantoms and I doubt you’re going to hear a noticeable improvement for that trouble and expense. Devialet seem to do a very good job of upsampling for their own DAC.
That would be an unequivocal YES! There isn’t a room you will live in that won’t benefit from fixing poor room acoustical responses. I’d go further to say that even modest improvements here will dwarf anything you’ll do with upsampling.
The Phantoms are fantastic (I have a Silver), but they will sound even better if you even out your room response a little, even that space between 30-300 Hz or so. Starting with the EQ controls is a very easy and good place to start. But the Convolution filters are amazing if you want to invest the time and money. The computer you have now can handle DSP to a single endpoint fine.
At this moment, I don’t want to spend much money to make improvements; I guess I will wait until the phantoms will become roon ready. I contacted Devialet and they tell me they are working on it… I hope they do! After that I will probably try several of the DSP features!
