OK thanx. I will wait for the support team’s reply. I would be very surprised if it would not support 7.1 over HDMI. This is really “old stuff”.
My 13 year old mediaplayer goes 7.1 over HDMI.
A regular CD rip has to be ripped to file format which can be played by a music player.
A Blu Ray with Atmos has to be ripped to a file format that a player can play.
MKV is a open source container just like Flac is a open source container.
This could be the bridge for object oriented audio files.
—MD
Neither one of these is an issue today. The issue today is Roon doesn’t support any DD/DTS formats. They all have to be converted to FLAC which is fine except it is an extra step and you lose Atmos during the conversion.
Roon supporting mkv just doesn’t make any sense to me. If Roon supported bitstreaming of DD/DTS and you had an mkv file with an audio track you wanted to play via Roon (no idea why this would be the case but…) you would simply just demux the audio track. Currently you have to demux it and convert it to FLAC. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an mkv file with just audio and I don’t know anyone who uses mkv for just audio.
I do.
The latest Beatles album Let It Be Deluxe Edition came with a Atmos CD of the album. There are 2 ways to listen to this Audio Atmos CD. One is thru a Blu Ray player and the other is to rip it a open source MKV file to be then played by a player such as Plex. This is the same exact audio copy of the CD and is ripped to be played as a Atmos CD.
–MD
I would argue the more correct way would be to use a media player that supports Atmos without having to stuff it in an mkv file. I’m surprised Plex doesn’t already support direct playback of it since it is able to transcode and bitstream it. MKV is just a container, one that isn’t even commercially used. It supports dozens of video, audio and subtitle formats inside it. Even if Roon supported MKV that doesn’t mean that the audio formats found inside it would be supported.
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Obviously it needs decoding and I meant an AVR not a regular amp perhaps I wasn’t totally clear.
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I have a couple of old AVRs without Atmos support that could use Atmos decoding upstream. But even A6 has Atmos decoding, without pre-out ports for each channel, I am not sure how to get the multichannel info into my old AVRs, so this capability is useless, except maybe for people with Atmos-capable headphones wanting to listen to Atmos tracks via A6 bluetooth? Or perhaps a decoder is not needed even for Atmos headphones because the headphones themselves do the Atmos translation?
This I totally agree, Roon should be able to do passthrough by now, but who exactly is the culprit? Roon not providing this “support” or device manufacturers like Zidoo/Eversolo not putting in hardware that will allow passthrough? Or is it possible that existing hardware in A6 is already capable but ultimately Roon is the party dragging its feet in terms of fixing/updating RAAT protocol to provide bitstreaming?
Roon has been designed to send pcm or dsd to zones. Anything else would be major change to
It’s playback engine and all the ramifications that come with such a large fundamental change. Unless there is a very large demand for multichannel atmos I can’t see them investing time to change the playback engine to support bitstream playback. The market for this is very small compared to standard stereo.
I don’t have the dmp a6 so I can’t test it. But the Atmos limitation can be a limitation of the dmp a6. My Roon core is on a PC and I use the PC as a Roon player hooked up to a Marantz via HDMI. The PC audio settings have to include Atmos selected for Atmos to pass through to the Marantz. So I am assuming the A6 would need the same functionality but I could be wrong?
Roon does not support anything other than LPCM or DSD to endpoints it has nothing to with the A6. Roon converts all formats it supports to PCM or DSD it does not support DD or DTS encoded files so just won’t play them.
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I’m not following you. I play Atmos, Dolby Digital and DTS files out of my Roon Core PC to Marantz via HDMI without issue.
If you bitstream Atmos to an AVR that doesn’t support Atmos you get the bed channels and Atmos is ignored. Even if Roon could decode Atmos (and repackage it as MAT 2.0 to retain the Atmos info which few devices can do), your AVR doesn’t support Atmos so, again, only the bed channels would be played back and the Atmos would be dropped.
No it doesn’t. Even if it did it would be the same story as above.
This isn’t possible. Roon simply doesn’t support these formats. Can you post a pic of your signal path while playing Atmos in Roon? What is the file extension of these Atmos/DD/DTS files?
It doesn’t decode them so if played conventionally all you hear is digital hash. But a ripped DTS CD can be played as a bit perfect bitstream into a suitable decoder through Roon.
I got an answer from the support team regarding flac, wav output channels. It is indeed limited to 5.1.
I pass.
Darko on Atmos etc…
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I see having read up on that format l, if they are ripped into dts wav files it disguised the stream as stereo wav files so will send them on. But won’t play without decoding elsewhere. I take it Roon will still be decoding to pcm from the WAV and the DTS info remains intact?
I’m not home to pull up a screen shot. But I create a backup of Blu-ray Discs using MakeMKV then use DVDAE to extract the audio tracks and convert to FLAC. DTS will show up as 5.1 and Atmos 7.1.
By converting to FLAC you are doing the decoding instead of the AVR. In the case of DTS you aren’t losing anything but with Atmos you are only decoding the bed channels and losing the Atmos info.
This brings up the question, what type of Atmos info has been proven to be good for music? Bed channels or object channels? Or both?
I get it that movies have things and sound sources that move across the screen or front and back, so we need all the Atmos info.
But in music, do we really benefit from complete Atmos info? Maybe downsampling to 5.1 or losing object channels won’t make a difference?
In the end, maybe A6 with its FLAC 5.1 “limitation” is as good as what available music content could provide? (not referring to movies because I use a proper AVR with Dirac Live)
There are no “object channels”. Atmos is objects except for LFE. The bed channels are only played back if your system doesn’t support Atmos.
I don’t know why you are making a distinction here. Atmos is Atmos, doesn’t matter if we are talking about music or movies. The only difference right now is Atmos on BR is lossless while Atmos on music and video streaming services is lossy. As for whether Atmos is worthwhile, only you can answer that. If you don’t have an Atmos system or you simply don’t care about Atmos, you already have your answer.
The same AVR would also be used for music. You can do this today without Roon by using an Apple TV or Fire TV with the Tidal app.