I have a lot of downloaded Hi Res albums on my server.
When I specifically choose any of these versions of a certain album and play it in Roon. The main page will show that I am browsing (for instance) a 96/24 version of this album but when I check the stream it shows that I am playing a 16bit Tidal Flac version. This is on a active speaker that supports Airplay2 and Chromecast up to 192khz, but also supports Tidal connect.
Whatever I try, even looking voor special editions of an album my system will play the Tidal version. I canât get it to play on a higher sample rate.
Is this something new, is this related to not directly supporting Roon? What can I do to play my own music?
To the best of my knowledge,
Airplay2 supports audio up to 48kH/24bit
âApple Lossless supports a maximum resolution of 24-bit/192 kHz. However, AirPlay 2 only supports up to 24-bit/48kHzâ
Chromecast supports upto 96kHz/24bit
âThe ones that support high res (Chromecast Audio) will output up to 24/96 out of their digital outputs. All other devices (ie: the Home series of speakers and all the Google Chromecast devices with HDMI output) only go up to 48kHzâ
The dac in your speaker may support up to 192kHz, but the specified protocols donât.
That still does not mean Roon should automatically pick Tidal.
It should play your local files, albeit downsampled to max. bandwidth supported by your endpoint protocol.
In Settings â Audio these can be set-up as different endpoints / zones. The one you select is the one Roon will use.
Roon does not support Tidal Connect
Roon does not stream directly from Tidal to end device. It streams from the Server / Core then you select the endpoint and it converts to that. When you select an album you should see a âVersionsâ tab. Select the version you want to play first (it will say currently viewing) then make sure youâve got the right zone select. Hit play.
Look at the signal path to confirm its playing the right version using the protocol selected. As others pointed out, Airplay supports up to 24/48 so if you used that you may see a sample rate conversion. Roon handles this on its own.
Thatâs what I meant to say: the signal path starts with Tidal Flac 44lhz, 16bit and after that either âAirplay 2â or Google Cast. I know how to select the different protocols that a device supports. But it remains very strange that it wil pick up the Tidal path.
In the past sometimes I wanted to compare my downloads with the Tidal version, it would play my own version by default and I had to change album versions to get a Tidal variant. But now it plays the Tidal variant regardless of what I choose.
It looks as if this speaker (Beolab 28) makes its own decision and thinks: âyou can send me whatever you want but this is an album also available on Tidal, so thatâs the one Iâm going to play.â
I hope it is not a commercial thing, artist get paid when a song is streamed through Tidal and not when it is from you own library,
In Roon the endpoint only knows about Roon. It does not understand where Roon gets the bitstream from. This is occurring at the Roon Server / Core. There could be a bunch of different reasons as there are many a knob to flip to change this behavior. One example is Settings â General â âStreaming service preferenceâ
You can set your preferred version per album and I think there is some global preference in the settings somewhere.
To change this behavior you need to make a change on the Server / Core. It has nothing to do with your speakers.
I wish Roon would do that for me, play the Tidal version instead of my old 160 or 256 kbps files. Perhaps I should just move them away into a separate folder where Roon has no access too?
In general, a setting like âAlways play highest quality versionâ might be nice. The option for MQA playback for instance is quite perfect I think.
You can have multiple storage locations at the same time. You then can disable a particular folder location and not disturb your library and then enable whenever to access these files. When disabled, Roon will not see these files.
