Isn’t that the truth. It may also be down to implementation - my DAC doesn’t do any uprezzing so only tried DSP in Roon. Some native hires I really like, but others I feel too smoothed out and lose the feel of the original.
Same here. I’ve tried this endlessly and always get the same result. No love from HQPlayer either.
I’m come to the conclusion my MSB DAC does what ever it does best, and modding the signal before the DAC gets it just isn’t helpful. It’s different, but worse.
The CXNv2 colors the sound. It’s even got this bit of info silkscreened on the back “2nd Generation ATF2 up-sampling to 24-bit/384khz”. I don’t have one but I’m going to guess that they don’t use the same filters across all inputs. And, maybe, they don’t use a filter at all with Roon? Who knows. You could let Roon upsample to 24/384 and that should, effectively, negate any internal up-sampling that the CXNv2 would do to the input.
I’ll also say that Roon is probably doing a better job representing the “true” of those recordings which is less to your personal taste. Go through the Qobuz Grand Selection and try different hi-res recordings. The new Diana Krall is classic, very forward vocals, and a a clean balanced recording.
A couple of weeks ago, I finally joined Qobuz and for the first week or so, I was agog with the depth and breadth of their collection as well as the high res recordings.
About a week ago, I did some A/B/A/B/B/A comparisons with some of my ripped music and that which was streamed through Roon and the same DAC (NADAC 8). No DSD settings were enabled and it was set for two channel audio (only).
I wanted to hear how the CDs I ripped with dBpoweramp compared with the high res versions available from Qobuz (in each case, matching resolutions settings that Qobuz reported). I checked with Roon to verify the resolution settings were identical before the “experiment” began.
Years ago, I began using a higher resolution setting on dBpoweramp when I rip music (in pursuit of audio nirvana and because memory is cheap) but have never really looked at how the sound quality/experience compares with the same music (with the same resolution). After listening to Qobuz for a while, it dawned on me that this might be a good opportunity to look into it a bit more than I had before.
To be clear, my intention was to see if the “adjusted resolution” (on dBpoweramp) compared well to the higher resolution music that is abundantly available on Qobuz.
By the end of my listening, I noticed that the recordings sounded very similar, with some improvement in the lower notes (especially bass) and sound staging with the ripped music in my collection.
The music used in this “mini-study” was Diana Krall’s ‘Cry Me A River’, Adele’s ‘Hello’, and Boz Scaggs’ “Loan Me A Dime.”
With the exception of source (music server versus Qobuz), all settings and equipment used were identical. All connections were wired and the internet download speed was in excess of 500 mbps.
Maybe this is similar to what Keith_Donner experienced.
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I’m also getting this as reported in another thread.
Using exactly the same files, equipment, cables etc etc, but when played through Roon it’s missing so much detail, so what the hell is going on??
