When using ARC my iPhone gets really warm and the battery is draining much quicker than streaming videos or surfing. That‘s strange because in ARC the display is off the most time. I‘m using ARC only in my local network as it feels more native than the Roon App, which btw. also make my iPhone getting warm.
I only use Loudness normalization and no other effect. The quality setting for playback is set to automatic. Most of my files are AAC256. It seems that Roon does not use the AAC decoder from the hardware and processes everything in software. Is there a way to force native AAC decoding?
I now tried to disable everything I’ve found (volume leveling, headroom management, etc.), but I can’t get ARC not to convert between 24 bit to 64 bit and back. It seems an iPhone only supports 48 kHz, so I can’t get rid of the 44,1 to 48 conversion.
No, because it converts to 48 kHz (necessarily) and all DSP happens in 64 bit space. This won’t be the big drain, though.
I was wondering if the default „balanced“ setting, which means CD quality on WiFi, might convert the AAC to 44.1/16 FLAC first, but it doesn’t seem to.
Does it change anything if you set ARC streaming quality to „original format“ on WiFi?
Anyways, there were many complaints about ARC battery drain in older threads, and not too long ago they released some improvements, such as
but it might not yet cover all cases. I guess it’s time for opening a topic in Support
Both ARC (1.71 by now) and the Roon app (when at home) use spectacular amounts of battery for me. Even though I have set everything straight through (no headroom, no eq, no volume levelling, using 44.1 flac straight through instead of balanced which forces a conversion from the bizarrely 48kHz lossy balanced file to 44.1 for my output…). So there is nothing happening in the signal path at all on my phone. Still the battery usage is several times more than streaming same files from the Qobuz app, screen off and nothing else happening in both cases.
I am not even using the Roon app anymore (streaming from a pc instead) at home because my phone is not a consumable/disposable item and the battery use would quickly destroy it (requiring 3 or 4 full charges daily instead of 0.75, or just requiring it to constantly sit on a charging cable). Something is very wrong and it has not been addressed. ARC is even worse somehow (again with nothing at all in the signal chain) but at least that’s not all-day-every-day usage in my case.
Thanks for your thoughts. I haven’t contacted @support as I thought the main issues had been resolved and that I just needed to apply the correct settings. However, as ARC is unreliable in many other ways too (e.g. launching, syncing, and finding the server), I don’t want to put much effort into it anyway. It seems that RAAT is the problem here, and I think it’s a design decision not to behave like normal audio apps on iOS. So, I’m happy that I still manage my files with Apple Music, so I can sync them for long playback. Every few months, I take another look at ARC to see if it finally meets my use case. I am aware that it is different from many others with expensive audio setups. And that’s what Roon is actually aiming for.
