Ok this has been raised a few times, more so by uses of Innuos as its the default player that the kit is optimised for. But others have also said that on hardware that is capable of being both a Roon Bridge and a Squeezelite they hear a difference. Also this is not related to this forum people say it on others a lot.
I have always been in the mind this can’t be true so I thought I’d give it a go myself with Ropieee XL as it can handle both. Surely bit perfect players should be the same? So I chose a few tracks in Roon and then same tracks in LMS, enabled Squeezelite and went a testing via my SMSL SU9 and Meze 99 Classics and Ropieee XL.
To my shock there is a difference, whilst its not huge it is noticable and I would say Squeezelite comes ahead marginally for me in this combo, but it will be down to your own preference I guess. To.me it feels lighter than RAAT perhaps more balanced in some way and had a tad more upper detail that was missing via RAAT as jt comes across a little bass bloatey and you loose some subtle details that you can pick up more in Squeezelite.
Oddly the difference is less noticable if at all if I add the Squeezelite endpoint to Roon and stream via
Squeezebox streaming in Roon to it than feed via LMS. I also set the LMS server to transcode to PCM rather than this be done on the endpoint to get it to be like Roons workflow. Didn’t make much difference if any but I have never heard a difference on any hardware with flac or wav etc.
Now both servers are on different hardware as I use ROCK for Roon. So could this account for this difference? They are both bit perfect players so how or why is there a difference? Is Roonbridge causing the difference issue or Roon server side?
If you do not trust my ears as a lot of you won’t and will be instantly on its bit perfect it can’t be different mantra. I was before trying this so try it yourself if your a Ropieee XL user and can run LMS as well and see if you hear the same or not at all. It’s not the end of all things nor will it send me back to LMS but it was interesting to try it out.
Just switched to Squeeze from HQPlayer. Antipodes EX is the core and Squeeze is on Allo USBridge running ropieeXL. I may not go back to upsampling as Squeeze is a significant improvement over roon bridge and equal or better than the pcm upsampling.
I have on a Windows 10 machine hosting Roon Core and LMS. Both interface to upnpbridg to Foobar2000 and then onto another machine running HQPe connected to dac via IS2 or USB.
I also have the option of sending Roon flux to HQPe directly to eliminate any influence upnpbridge and Foobar might possibly have.
I can only run one or the other, Roon Core or LMS, at a time as expected but otherwise absolutely everything in the path is the same. No DSP occurring in either. No changes downstream between switching apps.
I use LMS and iPeng player for serious listening and Roon for less so. Roon is as you say just not quite there nor the same in some subtle but meaningful ways.
Such is life. I mostly like the exploration abilities afforded by Roon but gosh it’s nearly as fiddly as LMS.
I’ve got some fresh impressions to share, as I just had a DSL-blackout for three days, caused by a new neighbor getting hooked up in the breakout box of our apartment building, accidentally disconnecting ours.
So I was forced to fire up my LMS installation on the same fanless desktop CPU PC where Roon server lives, playing via XMOS ASIO 4.67.0 driver through the Intona-isolated USB SMSL M300Mk2 DAC’s variable output, just like with Roon.
Convolution handled by Equalizer APO 1.2.1 unfortunately doesn’t work with REW inversion filters, so that meant going back to a discrete filter set.
My impressions weren’t glorious, controlling LMS via its quite nice looking material web interface.
Ever so often LMS just froze for up to a minute during library interactions, sometimes even with a disconnection alert.
Then, once an album was queued up, there were occasional stream intermissions of up to 30 seconds.
Finally, my Internet is back, and I’m so relieved to have Roon back up and running.
Tried to compare with my old convolution filter set, but won’t give any judgements, since I’m heavily biased, really!
BUT: ROON DEFINITELY NEEDS TO MAKE OFFLINE FUNCTIONALITY AVAILABLE AGAIN (voted for it already… )
Never had issues with LMS and playback, always been rock solid. It’s no Roon for UI and management but it’s a good backup I find. Indeed Roon need to sort out offline access.
It’s been a while, since I last tested after installing LMS 8.4.0 / r1680780553, but just now my first encounter with lags and intermissions on extended testing.
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