Right, I have just spent hours and hours playing and trying to figure out what could be making the difference.
I could have hit on it in my case, and I mean COULD, as I don’t know for sure.
Remember I upscale to DSD256 in Roon and run Roon Rock… I found the SDM Gain Adjustment was set to 0db by default. When I start introducing a negative db number things get much much better.
Now, this made me suspicious of what the default setting was in 1.4. I’ve done some searches but can only find reference for 1.3 (back then this was called DSD Gain Adjustment) and the default setting then was apparently -3db, from what I could find from googling.
Could it be that the default setting in 1.4 was -3db as well? I’ve never touched this setting before. If so, it means I’ve run -3db all the way up to when I updated to Roon 1.5 and then the setting has become 0db.
This is what I think has happened.
Now, I know this only applies to people using the upsample to DSD, but it’s seems like this might be the culprit for my setup.
I will have to listen more tomorrow as it is late now, but everything is sounding much more like it was. Less digital, less harsh (and note that I did say I thought everything was louder on 1.5 so this would explain that too).
In this particular instance Roon could be right that nothing changed but overlooked a setting that was changing in this release!
Can someone from Roon check this out and give me a prize if I’ve troubleshot this properly? (only joking, but I have done a lot of software testing before and have good ears).
I’m interested if anyone else who is complaining and is upscaling to DSD could try looking and seeing if the value is set at 0db and can try at -3db and see if things suddenly come right.
Of course, if my ears tell me different tomorrow I will be back to say so!