Can someone explain how Roon calculates it’s DR. I’ve just downloaded MJ Thriller from Qobuz. It’s the 24 bit 176khz version dated 1982. Roon is reporting a DR of 4. Which is a country mile away from where it should be looking at the DR database. Cheers Ian
Roon uses the EBU R128 standard to calculate the loudness numbers which are, as you have seen, not the same as the ‘DR database’. The Roon knowledge base explains it far better than I could, and there are many posts arguing which is ‘better’…
(Short answer - they’re just different, and effectively are useful for different purposes… )
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What’s weirder is that my 176/24 reads as DR5!
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Being picky… do you mean DR, or LRA as analysed and reported by Roon?
If you drill down into file information in Roon, the normalisation, loudness and peak information is interesting.
I wish Roon wouldn’t call it dynamic range. It isn’t, and always confuses people.
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I think we are talking about the R128 Dynamic Range:
It is a valid, if different, way of indicating Dynamic Range.
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Is this the newly released 40th Anniversary Edition?
–MD
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R128 is loudness range, often abbreviated LRA, not dynamic range. But it won’t stop people calling it dynamic range. Even Roon. That’s why everyone gets confused.
The EBU and AES technical papers explain why…
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No mate the standard version.
Most people outside the Roon environment would check the DR database. But then when you correlate the two there is the problem. I’ve tried to find if there is a relationship between the two but comparing DR to Lufs is like apples to oranges and a little above my head.
After reading a bit more about Lufs and R128. My original question seams to have answered a long time problem of mine. CD v Streaming, which sounds best!
After many hours of reading I now understand streaming services place the requirement of separate mastering for their services to come in at around -14 to -16 LUFS. That is significantly lower in volume than your average CD at around -8 LUFS. This is great for dynamic range but lowers the volume. After cranking up the volume when I play streaming services I can no longer comfortable pick one is better than the other.
One question I still have though is if the masters they receive need to be raised or lowered in volume level for normalisation purposes how much does that affect the sound quality or is it even audible?
Cheers Ian
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Roon uses the R128 standard , the loudness war website uses crest factor .
There’s a feature request to make crest factor a selectable option:
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