Roon 1.4 Feedback

[Grump]

Ouch… trying to avoid Google as much as I can in my life… Let’s hope Safari will follow quickly

[andybob (Andrew Cox)]

See if moving closer to your router makes a difference. WiFi strength can be an issue.

[zoom25]

I believe you. The performance can vary from system to system. Roon last year sounded so flat compared to MPD. Part of it was definitely on the software/network side, with RAAT getting better. The other part was my network hardware. I’ve experienced Roon from terrible (power line adapter), to MPD equivalent (w/o power line and dedicated stock network switch and power supplies) to excellent (LPS on the final switch + Cat6a SSTP w/ grounds removed on both ends on all the network cables in proximity around the audio gear).

It took me some time to work through all the combinations, but it wasn’t expensive in the end. It was more time consuming than anything. I paid $50-$60 for the Teradak LPS and $10 for the generic cables. It’s that simple.

For me, the change was on a bigger scale than playing around with flash drives vs. SSD vs. hard drives feeding the BDP-1. Now, I can truly use Roon without sacrificing convenience and sound. It was nowhere near that last year or even a few months back. I think you’d have been pleasantly surprised if you got to hear it.

Hope it works out for you.

[qdtjni (Johan N)]

Maybe I misunderstood you but are you saying that the Tidal streaming from an iPhone with AudioQuest DragonFly unfold and render MQA?

[Chrislayeruk (Chris)]

I don’t think Tidal will unfold MQA on an iPhone. Roon will deliver Tidal MQA if they are in your library (at least it does on my iPad Pro)
Meridian explorer 2 will unfold and render. The Dragon fly only Renders AFAIK. Explorer 2 is on offer £99.00 just now too.
The Tidal app doesn’t send MQA files on my iPad.

[Jeffrey_Moore]

Also, the zone picking/grouping is less functional - you’re now restricted from ungrouping the first zone

Yes, just what I was complaining about here.

Is there some kind of UI trick for conveniently dropping the first/“name” zone from a group, or is this an area where the newest version is just genuinely less functional?

[Jeffrey_Moore]

I also really like the ability to get rid of multi-part layout for albums. I’ve never liked the classical workflow or presentation that crops up in the odd album of mine that’s vaguely classical - I just don’t like the way the tracks are all lumped into one object and you can’t even see in the queue what’s coming up or easily reorder tracks etc. I’ll be setting this for all my problem albums (if only one could select all and apply it, I’d just do everything), and in fact would love to see a global setting for this in the future.

Yes to this as well. While I’ve always in principle liked the idea of grouping movements of a multi-part “classical” piece together to maintain its integrity, I believe that in practice every single time I’ve had reason to notice that Roon was doing this it was because Roon had done something I found unexpected and therefore annoying.

Case 1: I queue up a “classical” album, and while it’s playing I decide there’s a track from elsewhere which I want to hear soon, so I do an “add next”. Time passes, and I realize I haven’t heard the track I wanted to hear. On investigation it turns out that Roon has queued my I-want-to-hear-it-right-after-the-current-track-finishes track after the last movement of the large piece which was in progress.

Case 2: There are a number of tracks with complicated names and some common words at the beginnings of those track names which are grouped into an album. Roon decides because some prefixes match that some of the tracks are movements in a larger piece, and presents me with a complicated hierarchical display of what should be a straightforward list of tracks. The new v1.4 ability to turn off multi-part layout per album has greatly alleviated this problem.

[qdtjni (Johan N)]

That was my understanding too.

With an iDevice as Roon endpoint, I can play MQA files using an iDevice and an MQA compatible DAC such as my Mytek Manhattan II an it fully unfolds and render up to whatever was the max rate, be it 96k, 194k or 384k.
However, I just tried with Tidal running in my iPad Pro;

1. I don’t have a Masters selection in Tidal on the iDevice

2. The few ones I found by searching all show playing as HIFI and not MASTER

3. With MQA disabled they play as 44k

4. With MQA enabled they play as 44k

I might be doing something wrong but it certainly seems like MQA does not yet work with Tidal in iDevices.

[Jeffrey_Robbins]

The Dragonfly Red lights up blue for me when streaming a Tidal MQA file through my iPhone 7 Plus using the camera adapter. So, the phone must be passing the full MQA signal on from Tidal to the DAC or it wouldn’t go blue.

I will take a photo of the DAC and show the signal path when I get home this evening. JCR

[Rugby (aka Daniel or Big Dan)]

Does Tidal stream MQA to anything BUT desktop? I was under the impression that the mobile apps (phone/tablet) could not stream MQA at all.

[qdtjni (Johan N)]

That was my understanding too and one cannot choose Master in streaming settings.

[qdtjni (Johan N)]

Are you streaming through Roon?
If so, “DragonFly’s emblem displays different colors to indicate status or sample rate of audio data: Red: Standby; Green: 44.1kHz; Blue: 48kHz; Amber: 88.2kHz; Magenta: 96kHz.”

[John_McBride]

I’m not a Roon subscriber, but I’ve tested out all the releases. This may be the one that gets me to adopt Roon in place of my Slimserver/max2play/iPeng setup.

Things I like:

1. The new queue functionality, with a few caveats that I’ll detail in another thread. The lack of a non-destructive queue was a big part of what has kept me from signing up for Roon.

2. iOS as an endpoint.

3. The +/- volume buttons.

4. Volume limits

5. The ability to disaggregate compositions/works (i.e., have each album track be a separate queue entry)

Things I don’t like:

1. Large multi-disc sets are still pretty much impossible to navigate. Once you get up into double digits (or, heaven help you, triple digits) in the number of discs in the set, the interface becomes unworkable. This was one of the areas where I was really hoping Roon would innovate, because I don’t think there are any particularly elegant solutions available in other products. I’m sure the population of Roon users that has these massive box sets is small, but I’m also pretty sure that anyone who owns one of these sets owns a bunch of them - I only have a handful of these sets, but they contain over 700 CDs. I can’t imagine what the experience in Roon would be like for a “serious” collector of such sets.

2. While perhaps not directly related to v1.4 of Roon, there is still no fast scrolling/letter index jumping in iOS (at least on an iPhone). One of my preferred methods of navigating through my collection is to scroll through all of my albums in alphabetical order, like I’m flipping through a stack of records. I find that basically impossible on the iPhone.

3. The interface is optimized for desktops/laptops. But I find myself generally using my phone to control things. The one function I find myself using the most - the back button - is a tiny little UI element that I have to stretch my thumb to reach. The same goes for the queue - it’s hard to know what you’re going to get when you click on an entry - will you be taken to the info page for that album/artist or will you get the context menu? I feel like I’ve got a 50/50 chance unless I am very careful about where I place my finger.

4. General UI consistency issues

• Why are there no hyperlinks in the writeups for things like Genres?
• Why can’t I see the credits/extended information for an individual track in the queue/now playing screen?

5. By default, volume levels for each new zone are set at 100%. That strikes me as a bad idea because I can imagine, in the excitement of adding a new zone and getting things playing, someone destroying their speakers or their ears (or both).

[Jeffrey_Robbins]

Ahem. I have my color schemes mixed up. I have an Explorer 2 as well and it lights up blue for MQA files. So, based on that, it would seem that 48 is it. Sorry for my apparently incorrect information. JCR

[Jeffrey_Moore]

By default, volume levels for each new zone are set at 100%. That strikes me as a bad idea because I can imagine, in the excitement of adding a new zone and getting things playing, someone destroying their speakers or their ears (or both).

To me, it seems appropriate for zones to default to 100% volume, because for what I assume would be the vast majority of zone devices (straightforward purely-digital ones with no out-of-band volume controls), anything other than 100% digital volume would not be bit-perfect transmission of original audio, and breaking bit-perfect transmission would break encodings like MQA or, um… HDCD.

Every zone device I use, actually, outputs at its fixed (full) line level into whatever analog preamp stage does playback volume control.

Of course, I don’t use any mobile devices with headphone outputs for playback; people whose lives include those might care about Roon-side volume setting.

[Julio (SoulEye)]

Why can’t I see the credits/extended information for an individual track in the queue/now playing screen?

+1. This is very much needed

[Nyquist]

+1. Asked myself the same question yesterday when I was trying to get more info on what was playing.

[miklats]

MQA evolved:rofl:

[Xekomi]

Speaking of zone transfer, it’s a super small niggle, but there’s a 1-pixel gap on the zone selector of the mac version. And if things align just right, you see 'em three vertical dots poking through. It’s more visible with the dark than with the light theme.