I recently built and configured a Roon Rock and purchased a lifetime license. The system works very well with one exception: multi-channel playback via HDMI. I’ve looked at the various threads in support and have tried different settings in Roon to no avail.
The specific problem is the channels do not appear to be mapped correctly. This is a 5.1 system (specific configuration details below) and I’ve tried all of the combinations available in the settings (Channel layout 5.1/7.1, Swap rear/surround channels, multi-channel mixing, etc) to no avail. On playback, the volume of the right front speaker is low to non-existent and the rear speakers are overly loud.
My configuration is as follows:
Rock: Intel NUC mini PC kit NUC7i7BNH, 128 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM, 2TB Samsung SSD internal music storage
Connected via HDMI to a NAD T785 receiver
The source material is a DVD-A ripped via DVD Audio extractor in AIFF format, screenshot of the audio tag attached.
This is not a solution but some contributed information.
With DVD-AE, I do get rips with the channels in improper order in the output file. Sometimes, the order swaps center and sub channels, sometimes it swaps FrontL/R and SurroundL/R and, rarely, does both!
While you can use Roon to move the channels where you want them for playback, that is not a general solution and you will need a tool like AudioMuxer to fix the file.
Thanks very much for your reply. Although I’d obviously prefer a general solution (hopefully someone can provide one) your workaround is interesting as it sounds like the channels are indeed “rotated”/swapped.
How does one move the channels in Roon? I was looking for a way to do this but couldn’t find it.
I’ve not noticed this using DVD AE (converting audio to FLAC multichannel PCM).
Maybe I just haven’t noticed? Is the effect of switching channels always very obvious? Certainly switching the sub & center would be very obvious, but I’ve never experienced that.
I don’t think I’ve ever used it personally, but, I think you might try going into DSP, Adding Procedural EQ, Add Operation, Choose Mix. Defaults with 2 channels but you can add more channels and then mix them around.
Can I please ask you to send the source material over to us for analysis? I will PM you shortly on how to do so. As for a general solution for this issue, I will discuss this request with the tech team but if you want to, you can use @Rugby’s suggestion in the meantime.
Thanks for your reply. I’ve been traveling so am just now returning to this.
Prior to leaving I did some experimenting and am fairly confident that dvd Audio extractor is the problem. Contrary to what Kal said above, I had this behavior 5 out of 5 times with 5 different DVD-A’s - the channels were consistently “off” in that the RF output sounded as though it should be RR.
I re-ripped the DVD-A’s using foobar2000 and all is well on all of the discs that I ripped.
So it appears that DVD Audio Extractor is the culprit here - not Roon.
Thanks for letting me know @Greg_Smith1! Glad that you were able to pinpoint the issue ti the Audio Extractor. I wish you a pleasant listening experience !
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