Just to close out the original topic of this thread. I opened a ticket with Devialet on this and they confirmed that the reporting of lossless playback of streamed material >24/48 in the Roon Signal Path since fw 2.14.4 is a regression bug. While Phantoms do accept material up to 24/96 on the streaming inputs (RAAT and UPnP), the Devialet Operating System “DOS 2” is still filtering and downsampling such material to 24/48 before DAC. This incorrect reporting will be fixed in an upcoming fw release.
The DAC in current Phantoms is 24/96 capable, however this can only be exploited via Toslink in Direct Optical mode and not via the streaming inputs.
Thanks @struts for clarifying this with Devialet. I can reflect this in the thread title if you think it would be better to not trigger over expectations.
Just tested this in the latest 2.16.1 firmware and can confirm that the bug is fixed. I played 24/192 and 24/96 source material from my library via RAAT to my Phantoms and the SRC to 24/48 is now correctly being reported by Signal Path which classifies the signal as “Enhanced” rather than “Lossless”.
I think I’ve said this before somewhere… so this means that MQA unfolded playback is impossible as Roon will hide (disable) its MQA ‘first unfold’ function when a device reports less than 96kHz sample rate capability.
Not that it will affect me, I do not care about MQA. Many do, however, and I am sure there are Phantom owners among those.
Devialet says that Roon Ready can handle up to 24/96. Can one set ‘Max sample rate (PCM)’ to 96k and let the speaker down sample?
It’s a good question @ogs. Presumably the Phantoms are reporting to Roon that they can accept 24/96 material since they can, even if the first thing that happens to the signal when it reaches the speaker is that it is downsampled to 24/48.
In the Roon Device setup screen for the Phantom I Golds the user can select four different levels of MQA capability despite the fact that the MQA capability of the endpoint (none) was well known when the Roon Ready certification was performed. This would seem to indicate that something has been missed in the Roon Ready certification of the Phantoms, at least as far as MQA is concerned.
In contrast the same is not true of my Dragonfly Red that is MQA-capable and where this dropdown doesn’t appear in the Device setup screen:
Yes I can see that it is Phantoms that does the downsampling, not Roon. Missed that when I wrote the post.
Then I guess Roon is happy to do MQA decoding, but as you say, strange that Roon treats Phantoms as MQA capable when they’re not.
I would phrase it differently, “strange that Roon appears not to know what MQA capabilities Phantoms have when given that Phantoms are certified as Roon Ready, Roon should know that they have none”.