Roon ROCK Core with NUC7i7BNH cannot play DSD files with Convolution filter (Acourate) [Answered]

Not at the moment, no.

Multi-core, as an idea, sounds a lot more appealing than it is. A lot of people like to think of it as an obvious first step, but it doesn’t make things any more efficient, it’s just a technique that allows Roon to consume more of the machine’s resources to get a job done.

Consuming more resources means that any speedup or increase in capabilities is coming at the expense of something else. In Roon’s case, we are always trying to balance the constant grinding load of DSP against the need to keep CPU resources available so that browsing, focusing, searching are responsive. These suffer greatly when overall system load is too high.

We also are trying to balance the potential for people to be running many zones on a system at once. Optimizing the DSP engine to encourage the load for one zone to spread across 3-4 cores will not scale to multi-zone systems on reasonable hardware.

This is why we would much rather spend our effort speeding up single-core performance, and use multi-core techniques when we run out of options–since improving the performance of the algorithm is actually increasing efficiency, and doesn’t edge us closer to overall resource bottlenecks at the machine level, like multi-core options do.

BTW, the speedup from the new engine is a lot bigger than what you would have seen from multi-core–multi-core would have only given us 2x for stereo content (one channel per core) minus the overhead associated with splitting up the processing to multiple cores. The the new engine is 8-10x more efficient on a single core. It totally changes the performance landscape for convolution in Roon.

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