I’m currently running Roon on a Windows Surface. I get drop outs occasionally. I don’t mind these so much however it got me thinking that perhaps my Windows Surface is not powerful enough and that sound quality is also suffering.
My question is - do dropouts indicate that the hardware is inadequate and sound quality could be suffering?
I realise there are other potential reasons for dropouts e.g. network bandwidth. Please ignore these for the purposes of my question.
Thanks!
For the first part: it may also indicate a networking issue. How is the Surface connected to your local network?
For the second part: if you get no dropouts, sound quality is not impacted. That’s what ‘all or nothing’ means with digital.
Roon will tell you if the Roon Server processor is inadequate for what you are trying to do.
Unfortunately I’m using my phone so I can’t can’t change my Muse DSP settings to show the relevant part. However, if you click on the ‘quality indicator’, you will see something like this (details and proceeding steps will differ according to Settings):
If your Roon Server is not powerful enough, this screen will show a ‘Processing Speed’ indicator number (higher is better) which is not shown on my images because it is over 100. If your server is underpowered for what you are trying to do, this number will fall to value approaching one. If it gets too close, say less than 1.5, you may get the dropouts that you are experiencing. If your procossor is really inadequate for your DSP settings, then the processor speed indicator will fall below 1 and the stream is liable to stop pretty soon after being started.
Having said all that, if your processor is borderline, the symptoms heard on the audio will be occasional dropouts and clicks caused by the delay delivering data to your DAC. The actual data delivered will still be the same.
Consequently, other than the dropouts and clicks caused by a data delivery deadline being missed, there are no other effects on sound quality.
Edit:
Here is another screen shot of my processing signal path with different DSP settings that put a heavier load on my server (although still well within it’s capabilities):
It shows a ‘processing speed’ (circled in red) of 47.2x. This basically means that my server could do this same amount of processing on 47.2 streams simultaneously before the core was fully loaded - in otherwords, the stream is using 1/47.2 (=~2.1%) of my the capability of one of the cores on my Roon Server.
In theory, you Roon server is coping as long as this number is 1.0 or above. In practice, it is not constant but tends to vary a little. As a consequence, a better guideline for reliable operation is, as I previously said, 1.5 or above.
End of Edit:
It should be noted that the dropouts and clicks could also be caused by other system issues including network issues. Is your Surface connected to your network using WiFi? WiFi is not recommended for connecting your Roon Server.
Drop-Outs occured here in the past while my Roon Server was connected to my network through wifi.
After connecting by using Ethernet the drop-outs and track skipping have disappeared.
If your Surface is connected through wifi then I would recommend to connect it by using Ethernet.
Wade - thanks very much for your detailed and informative response. It is greatly appreciated!
My main concern was sound quality. I think it is possible for degraded sound quality if packets are being dropped since microsecond drops may only be detectable as poorer SQ.
However, I don’t see a processing speed on my display so I assume I’m ok from that perspective. I may very well have a network problem that I don’t know about!
Thanks again.
Processing speeds generally only show up here when a TIDAL MQA track is playing. That in combination with volume leveling shows up here as a processing speed. Usually in the high 20’s or so, so not a problem.
Another guaranteed one is when I set my WiiM Ultra to a fixed resolution output. So when on coax everything is being sent to the external DAC as 24/192. This forces Roon to upsample everything to 24/192. And next to the volume leveling I am adding will show a processing speed as well .
Normal FLAC with volume leveling does not show up as a processing speed.
Thanks everyone for your responses
Did you get better sound quality when you swapped to ethernet?
You could get better ‘stream delivery quality’ in the sense that the dropouts disappear.
However, the quality of the sound between dropouts will not change.
No digital data is digital data. It does not magically get better if you stream through Ethernet. However the connection has become rock solid.
I don’t recall which (if any) Microsoft Surface models have a wired Ethernet jack. They are pretty thin, so I suspect none of them do. If you have an available USB C port, this is a good option. I use it every day with my Dell XPS 15 laptop.
Likely that this will solve your dropout problems, assuming your endpoints (if you have them) are also using wired network connections.
Most laptops nowadays don’t have an Ethernet port. I’m using one of these to connect my Roon Server (Lenovo Ideapad running LMDE 6) laptop to my switch and router.
Not sure if you said that generically, but I doubt such short gaps are detected as SQ drop. Besides, you can’t really get microsecond drops. Even at 192kHz sampling rate, audio samples are already 1/192000 = 5.2 microseconds apart. If network packets contain as little as a few hundred audio frames, that would bring the gap to over 1ms, which is perceptible as a pop in certain case.
I get the impression from what I’ve read that the Surface is basically a tablet and as such doesn’t meet the minimum processing requirements to run Roon successfully.
Using the USB adapter for Ethernet will help but your overall experience will be hampered by the under powered sever platform.
Depends a bit on the type of Surface. If he has a recent one chances are it contains an Intel core CPU. Pretty much the same being used in current laptops.
Given how sensitive our audiophile critical hearing is, it would not surprise me if we can hear a SQ deterioration if there are few millisecond drops per second.
I’m assuming that we don’t hear these as drops but just sound quality deterioration.
I’ll start a new thread to cover this. Thanks again!
[Moderator edit: To avoid cross posting I’ve merged the new topic back to this one and adjusted the topic’s total.]
FYI my Surface has one usb port only. No ethernet.
This has nothing to do with audiophile critical hearing. The human ear simply can detect sub-millisecond sounds. @Marian already pointed out that a few milliseconds of missing samples create a clearly audible pop, not some quality degradation.
There is no need to believe or guess, either. Just take the Audacity software and test it.
If you create a soundfile at 44100 Hz with only silence in it, and set exactly one sample to a non-zero value, you will hear the non-zero sample as a click. This is essentially a sound of 0,0227 ms (the duration of one sample). You can do this with Audacity, or any wave editor that lets you zoom in onto a WAV-file and move the individual sample points around.
There are two parts to this question
I don’t care about the user experience or drop outs. My only concern is SQ. By SQ, I mean the audiophile stuff - quieter background, more detail, better imaging, sound stage.
I’m particularly keen to hear from someone who has tried this i.e. improved their hardware from borderline to great.
The reason I ask is that I believe my pc and network (WiFi) are borderline but I will only spend the money upgrading if there is a SQ improvement. I can put up with a few dropouts and slow performance.
Still no
/10char
