Lacking sound clarity when played via ROON

Include @support in your post, that is the way to contact them

Out of interest , my CXN is a V1 and I don’t see that internal upsample, I pass my signal via coax to my headphone amp / DAC

I think ROON just hardcoded that for CXN v2 but like I said they were wrong because ROON cannot know if I use analog or digital out put and if latter is used then CXN won’t do the upsampling.

But in my experiment I use analog output for both - playing from ROON or from USB so the same upsampling takes place in both cases and cannot be the reason of different sound quality.

It came from your DAC telling Roon what IT was doing to the incoming audio stream.

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I’ve also noticed SQ is affected by Device Settings. Try setting Fixed Volume. I’m not sure what Device Volume is.

My other settings are different than yours, so I don’t know for sure. I’m playing with the WASAPI (my device is a Windows 10 i7 laptop) settings (Clock Master Priority, Buffer Size, Event Mode), and those definitely make a difference in sound.

The settings: MQA Capabilities , Max Sample Rate and Max Bits Per Sample are ones that I don’t have, but they sound intriguing.

I’m similarly evaluating ROON and also Audirvana, 6 days left on ROON. I’m impressed with both of them, haven’t made up my mind. But they have different settings, and do sound different.

Device Volume

The CXN can act as a Preamp wth a 0 - 30 Volume scale adjusting the analogue output to whatever amp is connected

Making it Fixed Volume in Roon makes the CXN output at full output so no volume adjustment can be made in Roon

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Leaving as Device Volume allows the preamp output to be controlled from Roon

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Beware the Audirvana Remote app is simply that you cannot use it to play locally on your control device eg iPad, with Roon you can use the iPad as an endpoint

Is there such a HOT topic somewhere, but not about SQ but about the interpretation of for example Shostakovich piano concerto 2?
After all everyone hears the way the Roon sounds … Then why over and over to talk about it in vain!
Music, ladies and gentlemen, MUSIC!

For years, many audiophiles have pointed out that WAV and FLAC sound different even though the files contain exactly the same samples. One hypothesis is that the extra CPU processing (although small) required to uncompress FLAC adds noise or jitter that somehow affects performance of the downstream DAC.

To test, convert one of your albums from FLAC to an uncompressed format (WAV or AIFF) and compare to what you are hearing from Roon. Let us know if this change narrows the gap between Roon and USB thumb drive or DLNA playback.

Look on the bright side, at least you can tell the difference. When old age and tinnitus comes along you are less liable to!

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Pardon, what did you say?

A real sound engineer told me once during a recording session at the Swiss Television, this is the sound engineers greeting.

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I too cannot hear differences on my set up. Most probably age but another (hopefully) logical explanation along the lines of “heavier processing impairs SW” might be that some DACs buffer the input…

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Haha many a true word…
On the bright side for me I can down grade all my equipment and not notice the difference!

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let us not draw sarcasm in place of real issue. FLAC is just a container for losslessly compressed audio program. The issus is somewhere in the ROON signal path that is claimed to be lossless but maybe not be like that in reality

@Mike_O_Neill thank you for your advice - I will test “fixed volume” to see if it can improve sound quality.

To all - I was not going to start another holy war but since it is the only way to contact ROON support I just wanted to get clarifications from them in case I am missing something in my settings.

Lots of mostly useless responses just proves my point that community forum is not the best way of customer support

I come for the learning and help. I stay for the drama.

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It isn’t sarcasm. I am drawn to ROON for it’s easy setting of advanced things such as Event mode, Buffer Size, Clock Master Mode, etc. all of which don’t change the audio bits at all, but yet do affect the SQ (to my ears, anyway).

That you refuse to perform the test that I offered suggests that you are not actually interested in solving this problem. It seems that you are just here to make trouble.

@moderators, perhaps it’s time to close this thread. Thanks.

No, it what’s the device is reporting back to Roon, the Cambridge is not aware that you are using the digital output rather than the onboard DAC.

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The CXN v2 accepts maximum 192 input. CXN v2 upsamples internally everything to 384 no matter which sources and reports it back to Roon core which interprets all changes of sampling rates as a non-lossless activity. Many streamer don’t report back and the signal path shows lossless…

That does not work as the CXN v2 accepts only 192 and with that you cannot set Roon sampling rate converter any higher