Roon 1.3 upsampling problems [resolved]

Hi @support

I’m trying to upsample a 44.1 kHz Tidal stream in Roon 1.3 for Mac OSX, but the audio is entirely garbled in any mode. My audio device supports a max of 192 kHz. The same modes I’m trying in Roon seem to be working flawlessly in other Tidal-enabled software, as well.

The desired usage is Roon’s “Max PCM rate (power of 2)” mode. This does not work.

I’ve tried “Custom” and manually set 44.1 -> 176.4, and 48 -> 192. This does not work.

I’ve tried to rate lock my audio device at 176.4, and use Roon’s “For Compatibility Only” mode. This does not work.

There’s nothing else I can seemingly try at this point. FYI the audio device is a Lynx E22 with latest drivers and firmware. As mentioned at the beginning, alternate software upsamples to these rates without issue.

Thanks for any help.

This is not limited to Sample Rate Conversion. Crossfeed is producing the same garbled audio.

Hardware is a Late 2014 Mac Mini Core i5, 4GB.

During sample rate conversion, I observe CPU at 20% utilized, and Roon memory usage at only 400 MB. There are no other significant processes running on the machine.

Hi @ljgmdad ---- Thank you for the report and apologies for the troubles here. While I am not familiar with the device mentioned (Lynx E22), I did run a quick test using all the configurations above and have not experienced the same behavior while upsampling 44.1 content from TIDAL.

To help me better understand this behavior you are observing, may I kindly ask you to verify exactly how you are making use of the Lynx E22 card.

-Eric

@Eric

Thanks for your support. I’m connected to the Lynx card via Thunderbolt, which connects to a DAC via AES. Glad to provide any further details you deem pertinent? Direct and integer modes are enabled, etc.

All is well until any DSP function is enabled, be it crossfeed or sample rate conversion.

A screenshot of your Signal Path during the problem might help us see more about what’s going on.

One thing to try: limiting the bit-depth to 24bit in device setup:

Some devices advertise 32bit support to us, but can’t do it properly…just a guess. We don’t have your device in-house to test with.

See below.

Actually 32 or 24 bit doesn’t seems to matter. But, interestingly, when going all the way down to 16-bit depth, then upsampling does not even occur. The audio is clearly played back when Max PCM Rate enabled, but it’s simply outputting a 44.1 kHz stream.

PS Thanks @brian for your support.

And by the way, 32-bit upsampled streaming does work in other software:

Ok, try putting the max bits per sample back to ‘disabled’, turning off upsampling, but turning on headroom mgmt.

I’m trying to figure out if the problem is the higher sample rate, or the expansion of bit-depth to create headroom for DSP.

Oh, one other thing to try–in device setup, there’s “use max hardware buffer size” and “use power of 2 hardware buffer size”. Sometimes devices are picky about that stuff on the mac and it can make the output sound garbled. Try all of the positions of those switches.

@brian OK, so up sampling disabled, headroom management enabled, and max bits per sample disabled DOES work. I will try the up sampling with increased buffer sized next.

Working:

you don’t actually have headroom mgmt enabled in that shot because the toplevel switch for DSP Engine is off.

Oops, correct.

Yeah, so enabling DSP + Headroom Mgt does not work either. Nor does Max Buffer + Power of 2.

Here is the Signal Path with up sampling enabled (previously it was just normal Signal Path that I showed)… ALSO: I’m at max posts per day and it says I need to wait 7 hours before creating another post!

OK @brian I apologize… Now it’s working!

I think I actually got caught by not enabling DSP in two places… So NOW the 24 bit depth solves the problem and I can upsample to 192 kHz.

Thanks for your help. And maybe the master DSP enable switch should be activated by any of the DSP function enables.

Thanks again, this works: