Poor sound quality with Focal Utopia headphones and DSD files in Roon (ref#C68AF2)

Support
1

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· None of the above quite fits

None of the above quite fits

· None of these quite match

Tell us what's going on

· Very very high end system Focal Utopia headphones and DSD files really want to use Roon but the sound is awful. JRiver setup is perfect. Roon low sound and distortion.

Tell us about your home network

· No server running on win10 only, don't use or need any remote connections

2

Post a screenshot of the signal path

3

Tell us more about your equipment, what desktop/laptop do you use? Do you use a headphone amp?

Details always help in supporting queries.

4

Hello @redcvo,

We went through the logs. Roon sends your DSD64 files to the HDV 820 ASIO driver as native DSD with no processing, and DSP is turned off, so nothing in Roon changes the signal before it reaches the driver. We cannot see what happens inside the driver and the HDV 820 itself, so we need a few details:

  1. Please tell us whether the distortion happens only with DSD files or also with PCM files such as FLAC.
  2. Please tell us whether JRiver is fully closed while you play in Roon.
  3. Please tell us where you set the volume (the knob on the HDV 820, the Windows volume, or Roon), and roughly where it sits when the sound is low.
  4. Please tell us how JRiver is set up to play DSD (ASIO or WASAPI, native DSD or conversion to PCM), since it sounds correct to you there.