Roon 1.7 Feedback Thread

After some days of testing the update I have to say that Roon Radio just got waaaay better. It is more inventive, and adventurous. It finds more albums and musicians that I have never heard of but which are great. I really enjoy how it Helps me explore and puts me in touch with unknown stuff that I actually like, mostly that is.

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I’m having an evening of a combination of Roon radio tracks and Recommended For You albums, discovering all sorts of new artists. Also, having just applied parametric EQ to my HD650s it’s a cracking discovery trip.

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I meant that running this search the Albums provided are a bit of a hit and miss. Some have this composition and many don’t. However that is not a problem for me. Using the Composition tool I give hundreds of correct results. I cannot possibly know if some are missing (among those in Qobuz) but there are more than enough.

Hello
Anyone feel the sound quality is a step backward from release 1.6? The lows do not have the impact anymore and the highs not as revealing.
Thank you.

No, not at all. If anything, for me there is more clarity.

No, no change. Have you checked your streaming quality settings under services are at the highest setting?

AFAIK 1.7 hasn’t changed audio delivery–although there are streaming optimisations. See the release notes.

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My apologies I should have clarified that the sound difference is from the use of my local library.

In that case, I don’t think 1.7 introduced any changes that would affect audio.

Making all artists in my library Favourite instantly improved the New Releases For You results for me. Quite dramatically I must say!

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I had the same feeling as well. There is less resolution, sound is less resolved. Bass has less impact. Normally I don’t hear much if any difference in software but this time there is. I hwve just compared Roon to the native Tidal app and foobar. They all used to sound pretty much exactly the same to me so I never really cared about software tweaks to be honoust, but now there is a real difference and not for the better. Bass is wooly as if they tried to compensate for the lack of bass output of small standmount monitors. Highs are recessed as if they are trying to compensate metal cone breakup. I can imagine that people with such speakers actually might like it better but not me. I don’t know what has changed so I have to look further into it but for now Roon sounds pretty unevolving. There is less microdynamics, less resolution. A bit like 128kb mp3 vs redbook CD.

I am running Roon server 32bit on an Windows 10 desktop with usb/aes converter directly attached. This setup has allways sounded pretty much the same as the aes converter attached to either a microrendu or sms200. Now it might be different but I can’t try because I haven’t got an endpoint because it made no difference to me in the past

Thank you for your feedback. I agree with everything you say about the sound. My Briscati M3 DAC has the ethernet board so I steam to it across my network running ROCK on a NUC. This setup is compatible with Roon, Audrivana and JRiver. In the next few weeks I will try and setup Audrivana and see if there is a difference.

It is interesting that some are hearing a deterioration in SQ. Up the thread there are others who heard an improvement. The only changes that I can think of that would have an SQ impact are the improvements to efficiency of streaming content with consequent (small) reduction in CPU load. This could conceivably have an impact on DACs directly connected to a computer.

I am unaware of any steps taken by Roon to compensate or tune the software to any type of system components. What you describe would need an EQ filter which is incompatible with bit perfect delivery.

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I was able to setup Audirvana this evening. I get back the bass foundation and treble resolution that I lost with release 1.7. Not quite as good as release 1.6 but definitely better.

I read this just after suggestions that sound quality had improved, or deteriorated.
So I tried Favoriting some of the artists and not others, and sure enough, the Favorited artists sounded clearly better. :rofl:

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I describe it ‘as if’ to give you a characted of the sound I’m hearing. I am in the bit perfect camp as well. In fact this is the first time in 15 years I do hear a change in playback software. All other players still sound the same to me. I’m not a software tweakers because to me the differences are either non existant or at most futile compared to differences in other areas of the playback system. I normally blame the differences to other cicumstances, also this time. I found myself wanting to listen less and less music since the 1.7 update. To me that’s an indication something is not right. After trying my other players I have heard my good old sound quality again. I have no clue how this is possible.

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Hi Andy, I found your comment very interesting as it make a great point for DAC connected to computers/cores vs other solutions like audio renderers etc.
I do use an Auralic Aries as the endpoint with a NUC/ROCK core, no audio difference for me vs 1.6.
What I would think tough, is that the CPU load reduction should improve the audio quality, not the other way around and so I am surprised to hear these concerns about audio quality from a few users.

One more thing on the definiton of “streaming”… is that related to 3rd party services only (Tidal/Qobuz) ? Or does it include streaming local content from a NAS?

Just the third party services. This was the paragraph in the release notes:

Streaming Optimizations

For music playing from TIDAL and Qobuz, Roon now buffers data in a less disruptive way, and there are optimizations which reduce disk activity, CPU usage, and memory traffic. This means that streaming content starts faster and slower internet connections (or lower-powered cores) may also benefit when streaming high-resolution content.

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For me it is either with streaming Tidal or local from internal ssd. Processor activity has little to comletely no effect on audio quality at my place. I have tested that lots of times by stessing the cpu to 100%, makes no difference over here so I don’t think just sa little less cpu usage from Roon would have any impact other than lower energy consumption, which is allways a good thing

I’ve done the same thing out of curiosity; I’ve had HandBrake running in the background on a 2018 Mac Mini, transcoding a Blu-ray which tries to peg every core, and I’ve experienced no differences in streaming quality.

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