You are confusing bit perfect players with all audio playback products. DSP changes the sound. There is no debate there. If your complaint is that HQ Player sounds better than Roon or Audirvana, there is no debate. Only your opinion.
But if you say the same content, played via Audirvana’s bit perfect playback with no DSP (including upsampling), sounds better than Roon’s bit perfect playback with no DSP (including upsampling), that’s where I describe this as a failure downstream.
An analogy:
Chocolate by Hershey’s or Godiva? That’s a matter of opinion.
But if you told me the silver wrapper Hersheys’s Kisses tasted better than the red wrapper (same chocolate) Kisses, I’d blame your eyes and not the wrapper.
Roon (nor anyone else) contains the advanced DSP available in HQ Player. … But DSP alters the bits, so it doesn’t belong in the same category as bit perfect players.
Yes. If you are buying Roon only because our bit perfect playback is better than someone else’s bit perfect playback, you just wasted a lot of money.
Being bit perfect and optionally adding some good DSP on top of that is one side of what we provide when it comes to good SQ. Other SQ related items include:
- easy setup for known products, so great SQ is achieved out of the box (onboarding device flow)
- flexible architecture to allow for isolation of problem components (RAAT, RoonBridge, RoonOS, RoonServer)
- working with hundreds of manufacturers to get the best SQ in a turn-key manner (Roon Ready)