I’ll talk about our latest firmware feature being developed - Lossless Volume Leveling.
The concept is simple - take the Replay Gain metadata from Tidal / Qobuz / Plex and adjust the built-in preamp/DAC volume, instead of digitally manipulating the music before feeding the built-in DAC. This requires a streamer with built-in DAC for analog output. If you have been using Lumin app to control the Lumin volume for different tracks, then this feature works exactly like Lumin firmware automatically doing this for you.
As far as I’m aware, I don’t see any commercial streamer achieving this. Or if someone did it, they did not publicize the care they made to maintain bit perfectness to the DAC.
This feature will be available on Lumin X2 and all Lumin ES9038PRO and ES9028PRO models.
U-series (or the above models but switched to digital output) will also have Volume Leveling, but we’ll apply Leedh Processing Volume for digital output to external DAC.
This feature works with Lumin app playback of Tidal / Qobuz, and Plex playback. It does not work on Tidal / Qobuz Connect, and does not work with files tagged with ReplayGain from UPnP server. (If you use Roon for volume leveling to Lumin, although this works it is not using the feature in this post, and it will not be lossless.)
Spotify Audio Normalization also gets an upgrade as I replaced the standard normalization implementation with Leedh Processing Volume.
Users who would like to participate in beta test of this feature please let me know your Lumin model, which output (Analog / USB / SPDIF), and which service you use (Tidal / Qobuz / Plex).
Wow! I just installed the firmware and it seemed to supercharge the sound quality! As you’ll see from my screenshot I’m using “normal” vs “quiet.” I guess the quiet setting diminishes the volume level. I might end listening more via the Lumin app vs Roon. I need to do one additional experiment. Many thanks, Peter!
To compare against Roon, please set Lumin Volume Leveling to Normal, Roon Volume Leveling to -14 LUFS with adjustment for unknown loudness -5 dB.
Lumin Volume Leveling Quiet is -19 LUFS to follow Spotify.
Since the overall volume is decreased when using Volume Leveling, please turn up the volume by at least 10 steps in Lumin app, or at least 5 dB if using a preamp.
I was already using Roon volume leveling with these exact parameters, so the comparison with the Lumin app with the new volume leveling set at normal still is a pleasant surprise. I was, of course, expecting the same volume levels from Qobuz track to track but, for whatever reason, the overall sound quality of music from the Lumin app seems to have increased substantially.
