I am not a pro photographer but according to a person who makes their living that way, I have talent. Perhaps they are full of BS because I am rather astonished by the claim that a RAW file is essentially crap until ‘dealt with’ via a program.
Or did I misunderstand the comment?
A raw image file is essentially the unprocessed sensor data. If you view the file as raw instead of the jpeg thumbnail that is often available, it does indeed look terrible to our eyes. The data needs to be “interpreted” before it looks right to the human eye. That is what the software in the camera does when you save in jpeg instead of raw. Software on our computers tends to be much more sophisticated and powerful and will, with the right person at the controls, do a much job interpreting the raw data than the camera.
Hi, as a photographer, let me try to explain a RAW file. When the camera captures an image, light is passed through the lens to a sensor. The sensor uses a Bayer filter array to convert light which is an analogue medium into a digital medium - individual red, green and blue coloured dots with luminance information. It’s an A/D (analog to digital converter). This is a RAW file. The RAW file is a proprietary format which needs to be processed and converted to a viewable image (.JPG) The processing involves selecting colour calibration profile, choosing white, black and grey points, tone curve sharpening etc.
Think of it like film - once you press the shutter, the light image is captured on the silver halide grains on the film. You don’t have a picture, you have a serious of dots with colour and luminance information. You have to develop the film in a darkroom to produce a negative in the case of print film, or a transparency in the case of slide film. If you want to print from a negative, there’s a whole load of further developing and adjustment (dodging, burning etc.) using an enlarger to make a print.
You can set the camera to JPG mode and let it make all the decisions based on the menu settings to give you an image, just like you can take your film to a lab for processing. Or you can shoot in RAW and make all the adjustments yourself, a bit like taking the film into your own darkroom for developing and printing.
It’s like buying a cake, versus buying the ingredients to bake your own.
EDIT: I must learn to type faster…
Does the fact that I recognise a DNG being processed in ACR make me a geek…?
Nah, but naming the software I’m using in that first screenshot would out you as a nerd 
[
]RawDigger[/]
As an interesting aside - as we’re already about as far off-topic as we can get without sharing pictures or cats - I always thought it was interesting that digital cameras, at the point of capture, are analogue devices whereas film is essentially digital. Digital sensors measure the strength of an electrical signal at each photosite on the sensor (analogue) whereas the silver halide crystals in a film will have either been hit by sufficient photons to activate, or not - there’s no intermediate state.
I run Roon on an Innuos Zen server. It sound good, but when I run it via Squeezbox with “play from RAM” implemented. It sounds better. There is no way to measure anything, it just sound better to me. End of. You can believe what you want.
Spoke to a lot of Innuos owners that run Roon and they have the same experience. So yes bit perfect sound can be improved by software and how it uses the hardware.
In audio, most people want the file they receive to be unaltered from the original. They prefer to do their own alterations, if any, to their own liking.
I think the OP may be saying something like “will there be new DSP options in 1.8”. Ie “new ways that I can experiment with improving the sound that I hear using Roon”. This strikes me as different from the group of folks who say “my dac receives the same bit perfect stream from two sources and I like one better than the other”.
That possibility has been entertained, though they have not confirmed their intention. And it has been granted on several occasions that more or different options could be added but, no one knows what they might be and it would only allow for subjective improvements.
The flaw in your ongoing photography analogy is that people do get upset if their device changes an image. People who are serious about photography calibrate their monitors to get closer to the original file as supplied by the photographer.
The magic photo filters you mention only apply to the mastering side of photography/music, not delivery of the final product.
A myth is “a widely held, but false belief or idea”. We all have to live with, and hopefully get on with, others who believe things we think, or even know, to be false. Forgetting and moving on is one way of living with something.
Nobody is saying “Roon is perfect”. All we’re saying is it’s “bit perfect”. Nobody is trying to sell “bit perfect” as the “holy grail”. It’s only a prerequisite for music reproduction that does justice to the original recorded in the studio, nothing more and nothing less. Nobody is saying Roon can’t be improved per se…
Of course! People forget that while the ‘zeros’ and ‘ones’ don’t change, in the way they are received and played they can carry more or less jitter. So, I really fail to understand how this can still be questionable.
That’s exactly what I wrote.
As I told you, nobody is trying to sell “bit-perfect digital transport” as something to be “amazed at”. There’s no such thing as an “outstanding prerequisite”! In fact, that’s a contradiction in terms…
I’d still like to know how you can make a Bit Perfect Transmission of data (In this case music files via RAAT) MORE Bit Perfect?
Please enlighten us all…
Yes, but none of that has anything to do with an improvement of “bit perfect delivery”.
Yes, you can adapt the sound quality as you like, but this is nothing to do with Bit Perfect Transmission.
You can do these changes prior to transmission in Roon or post transmission in your Hi Fi System, but the transmission must be and is Bit Perfect.