I am mostly deaf so I have a powerful headphone amp with a balance control to center music on my headphones that is connected to my Chord TT2/MScaler. I’m wondering if I use the speaker setup in Roon to adjust the right channel output lower and remove my amp so that I can plug into the TT2 directly and use their amp output……will the quality of the signal be degraded?
Does Roon speaker setup adjustment to gain degrade the signal?
Roon will do this via DSP, so the results won’t be ‘bit perfect’
However no sound engineer on the production side would think twice about making a dsp adjustment like this.
BTW your suggestion of ‘lowering’ one of the channels is safe, ‘increasing’ an already mastered digital source could run into headroom limits - and hence clipping. So that wouldn’t be safe.
Thanks, I do it on my mojo2/poly for my kitchen table headphone setup but I was concerned for my desktop setup. I used a Sparkos Aries II amp in my chain and they have a beautiful 1db adjustment know for balance. It works very well. I was just curious if I can remove the amp from my desktop and just use the tt2/Mscaler. I can use the amp elsewhere in my home.
I don’t know your gear I’m afraid, but one of the nice things about Roon is that their their DSP path is well designed and engineered, so you can trust it!
Have a look at @DrCWO 's excellent post linking to measurements he’d done to find out about it and get peace of mind, that using DSP to adjust levels will not audibly degrade your appreciation of music…
Happy “centered” listening!