Hi everyone. I’m brand new to Roon and Tidal but so far have really been enjoying it. I have a 2018 MacBook Pro as my Roon Core. I have a 4TB USB drive filled with mostly ALAC files that I ripped from my CD collection. I also have a few DSD files purchased from Acoustic Sounds.
I’ve been getting by with hooking the USB drive up directly to my Oppo UDP-203. It can handle converting the DSD to PCM with no problem and sound quality is very good. The interface is extremely lacking however.
Enter Roon and a new Tidal subscription. I’m now using the Oppo as a Roon endpoint and mostly getting the purple “lossless” light for my streams. I moved the USB drive to my MacBook Pro core. The Oppo feeds into a Marantz SR7011with B&W 685 speakers. I like what I’m hearing so far but would like to optimize this system.
Any suggestions?
For hi-res music I have two questions:
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When I choose a DSD file, it looks like Roon is converting DSD to PCM and then downsampling it before streaming to the Oppo. Is this due to the Macbook? Is there a better way to do this to allow the Oppo to perform the conversion to PCM? Would it matter if I connected the MacBook core to the Oppo endpoint via USB?
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The Oppo doesn’t do any additional conversion for MQA Tidal streams. It looks like Roon does the first unfolding of the MQA file. I can’t help but be curious how much better a full MQA conversion would sound. Does anyone have much experience or opinions? If I wanted to add a MQA capable DAC, how would I go about fitting into my existing system?
Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions for this newbie!