But when I set up the device in Roon, it is NOT recognized as multi-channel device, so I have to choose a multi-channel mapping method. See screenshot.
Is there something wrong with Roon or is it M10 V2 that doesn’t actually do true multi-channel?
Thank you for your patience while the team worked through the queue to reach your report.
We have a few questions and follow-up steps to try:
From your screenshot, you have “downmix as needed” enabled for this Roon Ready Zone. If the NAD M10 V2 thinks it is receiving stereo content and signals this to Roon, then Roon will automatically downmix any multichannel content. Are you able to try selecting “Channel Mapping Only” and sharing a screenshot of Signal Path?
How are you connecting to this endpoint? We’ll need to learn a bit more about your audio environment to see where the downmixing is taking place. The NAD M10 V2 does accept multichannel playback, but requires channel mapping configuration via the BluOS app.
Blusound as a platform does not and never has supported multichannel audio for music streaming. As Roon is only available via BluOS module you only get stereo nothing Roon can do. Multichannel on NADs is only supported via the HDMi input and optical on one model. It only works using BluOS speaker groupings to send out the different channels and not via networked connection and not for music and only supports certain compressed multichannel content. It’s more or less the same as Sonos in this regard. It will take BluOS to support multichannel music before Roon can utilise this.
Doesn’t the quoted NAD doc say that M10 supports Dolby Digital multi-channel audio? I don’t think Roon does Dolby Digital. A 6-channel FLAC certainly isn’t DD, and Roon does not have a DD encoder to convert it (assuming M10 would even understand it over RAAT instead of HDMI or S/PDIF.
It’s not even that as I said BluOS doesn’t support multichannel music period not via its own software it’s just for video content not audio. It’s bad marketing on NADs behalf. You are correct though that’s it’s only Dolby formats it actually supports which RAAT would not process anyway as it has no licensed Dolby decoder.
At this point I am rather skeptical of pretty much anything to do with BluOS…
In this use case, I think you’d need a Dolby encoder though to convert 6 discrete channel into DD format, and I imagine licensing for that is even more expensive.
@CrystalGipsy Thanks for your technical information showing BluOS doesn’t support multi-channel if it’s not Dolby content.
I guess it’s not just NAD’s marketing that is misleading, but @connor 's response seems to suggest that the Roon-Ready NAD M10 V2 does accept regular multi-channel playback as well. @connor could you clarify about this? Is NAD working on a new version of BluOS with you that will actually support multi-channel (not just Dolby content)?
@Boris_Molodyi I don’t blame your skepticism, BlueOS 4.0 has been been promised for a lot time but it’s still not available yet. Plus its recent fiasco of losing Roon-Ready after firmware upgrade for some models does not add to confidence.
I had issues with how Roon Ready was working even in a previous version of firmware (you actually had to do a factory reset after running F/W update on the device)…
NAD down work on BluOS it’s Bluesound that do, owned by same group but different company. No idea if they have it planned likely not as it’s fairly niche for music. Best ask on Bluesound forum, NAD don’t have one
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