Roon Playback CD Ripped WAV File Vs Tidal / Qobuz

Roon Software Discussion
1

Folks,
Need some thoughts & advise.
I picked some tracks from diff CD and converted them to .WAV raw fully lossless & I imported it to Roon and played it.

I also played corresponding versions from Tidal / Qobuz 16/44 from Roon.

Every time I saw the the .WAV version from CD outperformed in sound quality compared to the streamed version.

The .wav file always was better in

  • sound quality
  • separation of instruments
  • bass
  • treble
  • dynamics
  • sound volume level or gain

The equipment setup is the same in both cases and I have a gigabit 1Gbps internet connection speed.
Have other folks experienced and seen this behaviour?
I would appreciate thoughts & comments on this.

2

People will suggest these are mastering differences, but in case you don’t believe all the different CD you have come from different masters as Tidal / Qobuz and you are willing to do some experiments:

Try compressing the WAV to FLAC with maximum compression (since both Tidal and Qobuz stream FLAC). Play the FLAC and see if you notice any difference - normally people do not expect any difference since the bits (after decompression) are still the same. This removes one of the several differences in your playback chain.

3

Thanks Peter, interesting are you saying the playback difference can be due to WAV vs FLAC
although both are lossless WAV sounds better than FLAC?

I will try to convert my CD files to FLAC and see if the audio quality matches up.
And yes the songs I selected were from different sources and not from same the album or same master.

4

No this is not what I said.

The file itself cannot sound different, but in some setup more processing in a computer can result in degradation of the SQ of a directly connected USB DAC.

I try to approach this from a point of eliminating different factors. The differences at least are: possible mastering differences, decompression processing, modem, and local source machine (e.g. NAS), etc.

5

there are actually 2 differences here.

  • music data on local SSD vs streaming (downloaded from roon core pc connected to a wired router thru gigabit internet)

  • WAV vs FLAC

  • the setup is a roon core that runs a windows nuc (core i5,16gb RAM,256GB boot ssd and 1tb data ssd)

  • streamer is a lumin D2

  • so the only possible eliminations and possibilities are

  • changing wav file to flac

  • either roon core or the streamer likes & processes one of the file format better than others