I can apply loudness in my endpoints and wouldn’t need it in Roon.
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It’s tricky because the desired amount of “bend” depends on volume level, and the electronics don’t know that (power amp, speaker efficiency, room size…). Making a Roon DSP preset is one way, but the user interface for adjusting it is tricky.
I keep remembering the old Quad of my youth (I think…?), which had a knob for adjusting loudness bend, and another knob for Tilt (bass up/treble down or vice versa), in lieu of conventional tone controls. Tilt is of course the “house curve”. Roon DSP can easily do this but I would like a nice user interface, with knobs.
I know this is an old topic…but I think one that needs attention still. I would suggest the loudness be variable and let the user set the amount of loudness compensation to apply. A slider adjustment going from 1-100 (min to max loudness adjustment). If people listened to roon at the same volume all the time this wouldn’t be an issue. But people do listen at low volumes at times and loudness compensation is needed or bass sounds anemic. When listening at low volumes, if we could engage loudness, and drag a slider until bass was restored, that would be really useful.
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All this loudness eq really isn’t all that necesary when you have loudspeaker that go low enough with low needed energy to get going. In technical terms low fs and low rms (not wattage but mechanical resistance). Small monitors or subwoofers with very heavy coned woofers won’t cut it. Small monitors haven’t got enough bass output to even get above the hearing treshold at low volumes. Heavy coned subwoofers with heavey surrounds (in technical terms high mechanical resistance) don’t start moving properly with 1/100 watt energy applied at late night listening. Unfortunatly such loudspeakers are very common these days because everyone want the most bass from the smallest form factor but that has it’s compromises, anemic sound at low volume levels just to name one. Without knowing your situation there is no general loudness contour setting possible. The hifi industry has tried it for 40 years but never really succeeded. Best you can do is to make a dedicated low level eq profile which suits your situation. But like loudness contours it will only work with a small window of listening levels and with dynamically restricted music. If you want better, start with better loudspeakers for the job.
This makes sense. Roon isn’t the answer for everything. Each part of the audio system contributes to the final sound. Roon just plays one part of that I guess.
I’m in favor of this. I have the RME DAC as one endpoint, but it would be useful for others.
I think a slider in the Roon interface to approximate sound level and adapt the equal loudness curve would do it. In the absence of a slider, a few presets based on the Fletcher-Munson curve.