I enjoy using Roon and so do other audio friends of mine but, in 2024, RAAT is really falling behind by most metrics of sound quality vs a few other network audio protocols. We’re having to create workarounds to use other protocols such as NAA v5 or Diretta to be able to get the most out of our digital chains. I’d love if RAAT was improved enough so that this would no longer be necessary. Life was simpler when Roon was a one-stop shop.
Just wondering if any work is being done on this front. Otherwise, I enjoy using Roon almost every day.
A few genuine questions how is RAAT falling behind other protocols? What are the other protocols? How does one measure the difference?
I have been listening to music for fifty plus years, and currently each of my three or four systems produce better sound than anything I have had before. I started out with a system that my Great Uncle built for me from salvaged equipment it was a mono-ish set up, with a 15”, 12” and 8” speaker array and a crude but effective crossover gizmo; but it sure did make those Rock & Rolling Stones sound both good and loud!
The answer to this is simple: RAAT is a bit-perfect protocol so it can’t possibly be improved in terms of sound quality; that depends solely on the streamed content. Spending money on fancy network protocols like Diretta that advertise better sound quality is misguided.
They tell me that the reason it sounds better to my ears in my system is that it sends, and subsequently decodes, more uniform packets in order to implement more consistent cpu and power activity.
Brad, I haven’t listened to Diretta for the same reason I haven’t gone to space to see for myself that the Earth is round. My critical thinking tells me that it takes more than listening to jump to conclusions. Also, DACs don’t have CPUs per se; their chips are quite simpler that CPUs and pretty uniform in their power usage. Those chips are not exposed to the irregularities of network transmissions, so if the audio is not glitching, they will produce the same analog output every single time. If you think otherwise, you need to show me some measurements.
Is just a data transfer protocol, like RAAT. Neither of these have anything to do with the sound of the data being carried to the endpoint.
HQPlayer which uses NAA might sound different to you, but, it is not because of NAA, but, rather the HQPlayer program itself and upsampling and filtering it is doing.
You should be asking if Roon will change their upsampling and filtering algorithms. Like HQPlayer the processing is being done in the Roon core. RAAT has nothing to do with it.
Two protocols that have easily perceptible differences are Sygnalist’s NAA protocol (specifically v5) and Diretta.
I agree, Roon has given me better sound than I’d ever heard before for the past 4 or so years I’ve been using it so I was also skeptical of fooling around with other network protocols but friends in the audio communities I’m a part of assured me it would be worth exploring beyond RAAT and they were right. If you have the hardware for Diretta, I’d definitely recommend checking out the trial. If not, a trial of HQPlayer to route Roon through NAA v5 will also do the trick.
For a time I thought similarly… but you won’t know the taste of sushi until you eat it.
Digital audio has proved to be more complex than I’d imagined. I highly recommend you trial Diretta or HQPlayer (whatever works for your existing hardware) to bypass RAAT and use their network protocols. It’s not about fudging with the bits. I turned off all sound processing in HQPlayer (I’m not upsampling nor resampling) and only use it as a pass-through for NAA v5. it’s about better transporting those bits to your DAC.
You never route Roon through NAA, you route Roon to HQPlayer and then HQPlayer uses NAA to deliver the processed data to the endpoint. Just plug in a USB DAC to the HQPLayer PC, you can play straight to it without NAA, sounds just as good. NAA does nothing to the sound.
If you don’t believe me, then perhaps the @jussi_laako can comment.
Yes, sorry you’re right. Route Roon through HQP to use NAA.
You can definitely just wire up hardware with HQP to your DAC. Now that I’ve heard network protocol alternatives to RAAT I just wonder if Roon might update RAAT to compare more favorably to them.
The elephant in the room: All such comparisons involve different data and code paths upstream of the actual A2D circuitry. Having worked in computing R&D for decades, I’ve seen way too many supposedly “equivalent” processing paths that on closer scrutiny aren’t, even though they all kind of “work.” IOW, the arriving bits via RAAT, NAA, Diretta, may be the same, but the code that buffers and delivers a timed stream to the D2A circuitry has to be different (different protocols). Are all those pieces of code equally bug free? Ensuring correctness in realtime processing is really, really hard, and the best engineers able to achieve that have multiple career paths way more lucrative than specialty audio vendors.
I also didn’t think transfer protocols had anything to do with the end-result but the audio communities I’m a part of are coming around to it and helping each other integrate NAA or Diretta into their Roon experience.
I don’t use HQP to upsample or filter anything and wouldn’t want Roon to either. I just use it as a straight pass-through for NAA.
I didn’t start this thread to just put down Roon. I’m a customer and user and hope to be for years to come so I wonder if there’s any plan to improve the networking side of it.
That’s really easy to verify. Just capture the bits on the other side and compare. We don’t need to speculate. Has anyone detected any difference so far?
Good point, but “the other side” is some circuitry inside a DAC that may not be obvious or accessible. Alternatively, one could take fixed tracks, feed them in through different protocols, and then do a careful numerical comparison of the corresponding audio outputs. The only time I saw such a comparison (can’t find it now), the two waveforms were indistinguishable.
Again, it’s not about messing with what bits are being transported. That stays the same. It’s about the way the packets of information are packaged and sent to minimize circuit/power supply noise, minimizing time domain issues, etc. The bits are the same yet, oddly, the sound is different. If you are able to trial Diretta or HQP to use NAA I recommend you give it a day. There are perceptible gains to be had.
There are many of us that are already using alternatives and hearing differences in sound quality. If you don’t want to give it a go that’s fine but I wouldn’t be so sure without first trying.
This is an absolutely meaningless word salad from people who are trying to sell you on some mediocre but pricey equipment,
Some people claim to hear differences between fuses. And between the same fuse plugged in in a different directions. Just as with network protocols, these differences are entirely imaginary.
RAAT and all other network protocols happen outside the DAC though. That’s what’s being questioned here. It’s relatively easy to capture what’s being sent to the DAC by the endpoint, and there’s also the RME DAC that can do it for you.
Which is what I would expect. Computing would be a total mayhem if we didn’t figure that part already.