I just got the Roon Ready JBL Charge 5 Wi-Fi. I noticed that when I play though RAAT selecting the Roon Ready device in the Audio settings it down or up samples everything to 48 KHz no matter what. What is strange is that if I play the JBL through Chromecast (so going to audio settings and selecting the chromecast device) it plays lossless without down or up sampling music, and doing it so only if I reach the chromecast limit of 96 KHz. So my question is: why if through chromecast I can play the JBL over Wi-Fi losslessly, I can't do it through RAAT being it Roon Ready? Screenshots in the next comment.
Describe your network setup
I run the Roon Server in my Windows 11 laptop (HP Spectre x360 - 13-aw0013nl), Intel(R) Core™ i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz, 1498 Mhz, 4 core, 8 processors, RAM 16GB. I move from 4 different houses a lot so it's always connected to those 4 Wi-Fi routers and I use the laptop also to listen to music. I use my Galaxy A54 as a remote too and to use ARC.
That’s because it can support it as an input but the device will downsample it to 48/24 internally. This isn’t visible via Chromecast as only RAAT feedbacks what happens on the device as it’s part of the RAAT SDK. These speakers do not handle anything higher internally. RAAT has a full understanding of its capability and thus downsamples using Roon rather than let the device do it. On a speaker like this what use is hires you will never be able to play it loud enough to warrant it before it’s distorted to hell anyway.
Max PCM rate for the Charge-5 WiFi is 48kHz. I have two of them for the garden and I’m quite happy with them. The sound is great for a box like this, they play perfectly in sync via RAAT and the WiFi reception is excellent, even 50 m from the house everything works fine. No need to complain.
@BlackJack I had seen that thread but mistakenly thought it didn’t answer my exact question, so I felt the need to create a new one. Re-reading it with all your replies here I understand it better. My bad.
I have a few more questions to understand fully the Roon Ready meaning:
Given all these infos, for the JBL Charge 5 Wi-Fi specifically, what benefits do I have for it being Roon Ready over it having, for example, only Chromecast support? What comes to my mind is: the resample conversion happens in Roon and not inside the speaker; and by being Roon Ready it can be grouped with other RAAT zones, while with only chromecast or airplay it would’t be possible. Are there other advantages I’m missing?
It seems that I have erroneously assumed that if a device is Roon Ready it could play bit perfectly whatever Roon sends to it. While, in this Charge 5 WiFi case, it has a limitiation to 48 Khz. My question is: being it Roon Ready does not mean that it should be able to play lower than 48 KHz files bit perfectly either then?
Then what exactly can this speaker play? I get the 48 Khz fixed limit, but what about the bit depths? If I play something that has 48Khz with the RAAT Charge 5 the signal path is all lossless. So even though inside the Charge 5 there is some DSP going on, can I be sure that in this instance (the file being 16/24bits and 48 KHz) it is bit perfect? (given no volume normalization or other MUSE settings on)
I was not expecting to hear High Res music through it but I was hoping to be able to stream in CD quality bit perfectly or whithout any loss to sound because of the Roon Ready certification. But I’m getting the Roon Ready meaning erroneously right? In any case, if I stream a standard CD quality 16 bits 44.1 KHz and it gets resampled to 16 bit 48 KHz, do I have any theoretically degradation to the sound or given in this instance it’s an upsample it doens’t degrade anything?
These type of speakers use DSP to tune them and have bass/treble and eq if they allow that. This then limits the sound processor to work at a fixed rate for simplicity and cost savings. In the case of these speakers it’s 48/24 they process DSP stuff at. Any incoming signal not matching this will get up or downsampled in this case by Roon or on the device if using other options. Unlikely you will any difference.
