Both are useful. Blindly following measurements is stupid
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Ultimately one listens with oneās ears and chooses audio gear using them. To do otherwise is positively idiotic. Iāve been reviewing for 30 years and my ears usually prove correct when the measurements follow. Not always but usually. I do well in blind tests too.
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Weāre all friends here right?
We can disagree, we donāt need to get all upset about it.
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Are those measurements of things that we canāt actually hear and weād not be measuring things we can hear because we donāt have the instruments or perhaps the knowledge. Tubes amps test worse and sound better to some. So yes and no.
[moderated]This thread is all about observational sonic differences not measured ones.
I agree. What you like is subjective and you should follow your nose, eyes, ears whatever.
Claiming an improvement X because of Y, and asking someone to invest time and resources in making a change requires reproducible evidence that is verifiable.
Otherwise join a church.
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Or you could just have a listenā¦
The point is they also measure differently and a lot of people (me included) find the small amount of 2nd order distortion they produce to be pleasing.
I dunno. Gavin Newsome pointed out that L.A. is now experiencing a āmedieval diseaseā (typhus). Maybe itās time for medieval pre-Enlightenment (I guess that would logically be darker) mystical magical thinking about more things. After all, this whole evidence-based scientific method thing is relatively recent ā doubt fire was tamed using it. Time to pray to various gods (Bob Stuart, Archimago, etc.?) for better SQ, and sacrifice cash on an alter of audio gear to appease them.
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If a hundred people on a forum told you you could fly if you jumped off the Empire State Building, but produced no evidence as to how or why, would you do it?
Somebody would!
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Exactly! How do you think religious cults start?
How do youi know you canāt unless you try?
If their retort was their system was more resolving hell yes, just to get away from that arguement. Itās nearly as bad as you have to train you ears to hear the differences in Wav, flac etc.
On what basis do you make that claim?
You have gone to an absurd extreme. There is also double blind testing before you cross the street because, well, you know, our senses are not to be trusted at all.
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Please keep the discussion about the ideas and not each other.
Greetings @brian
I had decided to walk away from this discussion, because everything I said was being attacked or ridiculed. Iām a reasonable person, a Roon lifetime subscriber, and have no interest in flame wars. Since you are Roonās CTO, I am going to summarize the request - itās not a demand, just a request - that Iāve tried making in my previous posts.
In my listening experience, I hear much better sound quality with a chain comprising a Roon Core and an endpoint running squeezelite, in comparison to that same endpoint running Roon Bridge, both feeding the same DAC and the rest of the audio chain. The only difference between the configurations is the āendpointā software. The endpoint HW does need to have at least 8GB of RAM, and squeezelite needs to be running with large input and output stream buffers (2GB each).
I am not the only one who hears this. Innuous actually ship an experimental mode on their servers to enable this mode.
A perusal of forums devoted to this product set show that many people have found this combination of Roon/squeezelite with large buffers to sound better.
One might ask: well, if that sounds so good to you, then problem solved. Just use the feature, and live your life in happiness and peace. Unfortunately, this configuration is not officially supported by Roon and is both buggy and feature limited. Specifically:
- Sample rates are restricted to 24/192
- Playback randomly skips to the next track
- Playback isnāt reliably gapless
- pops and crackles.
Now, I canāt supply an explanation for why sound quality is enhanced with this flavor of squeezelite. However, I have supplied the exact parameters with which to run squeezelite in order to listen for yourself.
So what am I requesting? Please try the experiment for yourselves and see if you hear the improvements. Assuming you do, please consider how Roon can be improved to deliver this sound quality. Thatās it.
As a committed Roon subscriber, I have zero interest in running squeezelite, because itās clunky and buggy to do so. However, if delivering the sound quality improvement in the native Roon path is impractical, or inconsistent with Roonās architecture, then perhaps there can be some effort in just improving the squeezelite support to make it less buggy.
This is all, respectfully, that I am asking Roon to consider. I hope I can get a respectful response.
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First I hear well but admit to ignorance (but am always learning) so offer these points about my experiences with some of the more popular players.
- I started with Squeezebox and found that it always sounded excellent but I hated the interface, lack of support and abandonment by Logitech.
- Which brought me to jRiver. A great program but ruined (for me) by the obtuseness of the owner and without such add ones like jPlay, Fidelizer, and others did not sound as good to me as Squeezebox.
- The PS Audio program eLyric sounded (I think) as good as Squeezebox software and surpassed it with the addition Fidelizer and jPlay marginally. I loved its library feature but it could never get gapless right and was abandoned.
- HQPlayer awesome sound. But inadequate interface. But I purchased it to use with ROON.
- ROON excellent sound on its own, awesome interface (Iām a Roon Lifetime guy.) Roon is better with Fidelizer and jPlay. But best when using it in combo with HQPlayer, and one can add Fidelizer, and jPlay (until I decided to use the Ultrarendu instead of my Paul Pang USB card) as well.
It would be interesting to know how RAM memory was implemented in each of these programs and if the addons like jPlay, Fidelizer, HQPlayer (I know it can stand on its own as well.), created a large memory pool? For example, does HQPlayer play back from memory? Is that why why the team of ROON and HQPlayer sound better than just ROON even without HQPlayerās SOTA upsampling and filters?
Perhaps if ROON created and incorporated a RamDisk inside ROON itself for the tracks to be loaded into before playback? I could see this costing $$$ for hardware but perhaps it could be accessed through ROON setup for those willing to give it a try? Perhaps this could coordinate the conflict between gapless and memory playback.
In my experience trading gapless playback for memory playback would be a ROON killer. I helped beta test eLyric and people howled, snarled and foamed at the mouth during the trials. It didnāt bother me that much but listening to an album like āDarkside of the Moonāwas just not the same with gaps.
Forever learning and listening.
If you are using an Ultrarendu, how could it not be playing from RAM ? It has no storage except RAM.