Your not alone. Mines massively different, furniture all plays apart to.
1 Like
Hello Frudogg,
Check out the Roon Extension CD Player v0.2.0
which will allow you to play your âhard musicâ through the Convolution Engine and your HAF filters.
Thanks for the heads up. i will look into this.
Received my filters from Thierry today, have them in Roon and the sound is quite a bit better to my ears. Subtle details are much more clear, imparting quite a lot more âspaceâ to the presentation. On one live recording of a small jazz group, I was really amazed how different, in a good way, the drum kit and piano sounded. And I can tell the bass prior to the filters was masking some of these details, and it was too strong at many of the low frequencies.
I have both the standard filters and the excellence option with cross talk correction. So far have only tried the cross talk corrected version. I listened to both in the sample tracks Thierry sent and liked them both, had not come to a conclusion which I liked better.
1 Like
I have been able to try the new product of Home Audio Fidelity âRoom Shaperâ, which works as a complement to standard âconvolutionâ DRC. There is a much better and comprehensive review here on another forumâŠ
Link to HAF website : https://www.homeaudiofidelity.com/english/plugin/
Setup:
PC NUC server : Roon Rock
PC DSP : Roon Bridge --> Virtual Cable A --> Foobar / Room Shaper VTS --> Virtual Cable B --> HQPlayer / HAF DRC+2x4 way active filtering + upsampling 8 x 384kHz PCM-poly-sinc-ext2-NS5 + volume control
PC Nuc Player : HQPlayer NAA --> Exasound DAC driver --> USB --> Exasound 8 way DAC E28 --> Amps --> 2x4way DIY dipole speakers
My room is large, untreated, and quite reverberant, with RT going nuts at >1s below 100Hz⊠DRC took care of tampering the main modes but I still have huge delays in the bass at certain frequencies.
I measured my room with DRC active of course as per the instructions, with REW, then exported the impulse responses, and imported them in the plugin. It took 2 minutes for the plugin to compute.
Pros :
- it works beyond expected⊠waow, really the room DISAPPEARED.
- especially good on complex electro tracks, drums,
- no artefact I could hear - no need to compromise with other aspects.
- it is UNIQUE - no other DRC or DSP I know could do this, DIrac, Audiolense, AcourateâŠ
Cons :
- complex or very complex to setup in a Roon/HQPlayer environnement. Thus reducing target market to <1% of audiophile (and I am optimistic). A native implementation in Roon or in hardware streaming device would probably help
- WASAPI requires fix frequency, the audio chain cannot adapt to changing rates (not a Room Shaper limitation). Maybe I should have implemented something with ASIO.
- loss of volume control from Roon, requires HQPlayer Client or DAC volume control, not practicle and 0% WAF and 50% KAF (my son is kinder). Also at the beginning of listening session, Foobar and HQPlayer need to be launched âmanuallyâ
- some instabilities : got one crash of Foobar.
- the documentation doesnât mention it but Wasapi Output add-on needs to be added to Foobar for Virtual Cable to work well
I bought the pluginâŠ
Room Shaper is to me a major and unique innovation in room correction for HiFi, one that you donât see every year⊠I hope it can find its way in Roon or Streamers/DACs so that anyone with long delays in the bass (i.e. the majority of us) can benefit from it.
4 Likes
Why do you need foobar as well?
I guess running Roon with room shaper would be a lot easier? Ie. No HQP.
Shame Roon doesnât support VST, but its not fully cross platform. Sounds like this is missing link for DSP.
1 Like
For standard stereo setup youâre right Roon with Room shaper standalone can work.
I am doing 8 channel for 2x4 way setup hence the complexity.
HQPlayer is part of my setup anyway as its upsampling/noise shaping is much better than Roonâs.
How would this work for normal Roon operation unless you use a pc as an endpoint. How do you get it to pass it on via RAAT to a Roon Ready Device?
You canât for nowâŠ
Thought not 
If someone is interested to test Room Shaper, I can compute a sampler for you, consisting of two files 1) original 2) âRoom shapedâ . Just copy the files in any directory monitored by Roon and you can do A/B comparison. For this I need a measurement or impulse response at listening spot of left speaker and right speaker. Keep DRC on if you use one already (HAF, or any DSP you have activated already). Send me MP.
2 Likes
I am using https://www.vb-audio.com/Cable/
One cable is free, you can get more with a small contribution. Very stable.
Many thanks. I have always wanted to try something like this, along with HQ Player, so this new Room Shaper product gives me the excuse I need to try both. For simple two channel ROCK based system, would the following work?
NUC1 Server: ROCK with DSP - HAF DRC
NUC2 Player: Roon Bridge --> Virtual Cable A --> Room Shaper Standalone --> Virtual Cable B --> HQPlayerâ>USBâChord Qutest DAC
ROCK could run the HAF DRC if I had that done. Do you have HQPlayer running that in your setup (I am not familiar with HQPlayer software and its capabilities) and if so how and why donât you have ROCK doing the HAF DRC?
Any idea if cable thing will work on apple mac?
APowersoft Audio Device worked for me on Mac. iSHowU Audio Capture as well. Make sure sampling rates and but depths are well configured in Audio Midi Setup Utility.
Overall I found WIndows a more reliable platform for audio tweaks.
I have also tried the VB cable approach, but the big drawback is that you have to set a specific sample rate. I have playlist with mixed CD and MQA for example, so I have to set sample rate to 96khz which means I have to use Roon to up-sample to 96khz. But this removes some of the benefits of HQPlayers up-sampling.
Also, the 64-bit float streaming feature between Roon and HQPlayer canât be used, which means some unnecessary conversion between integer and float.
Unfortunately youâre right⊠an integration in Roon or Ă la HQPlayer would be fantastic
Thierry is updating my original filters from nearly 3 years ago. I do enjoy generic x-talk most of the time more than non x-talk.
Those that have the âHead Modelâ x-talk version, are you finding it that much more enjoyable than generic x-talk or does one need to step up to HRTF to get significant improvements?