Roon Sound Quality is Excellent - Good Ups! Anybody else hearing this?

After moving onto HQ Player to tinker with upsampling to achieve better sound quality at least a few years ago, I just tried listening to Roon without any additional software or Roon DSP and was pleasantly surprised. Roon sounds great now! There is an emotion and weight to the sound that I don’t recall from before. It is less clinical and flat. Just more enjoyable overall!

Anybody else think so?

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In theory, as Roon sends a bit perfect stream of data from the core to an endpoint, each release should sound exactly the same as the last one, assuming you haven’t been tinkering about with HQ Player or DSP. That said, you’ll find plenty of posts every time a new release appears. Some posts will say it sounds better, some will say it sounds worse, but by far the largest percentage will argue that it sounds exactly the same, because how could it be otherwise?

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The funny bit is that most enthusiasts / audiophiles don’t seem to realize that the quality of hearing is not fixed. There are days where one’s hearing is far more sensitive. Also your emotional state of mind has a huge influence on the way you perceive something as emotional as listening to music.

Think about that the next time you have listened for 20 minutes after a Roon update :P.

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I thought the latest version of Roon sounded more forward… my wife came in the room and asked, “Did you know music was playing through the speakers?” I didn’t hear what she said, so I took off my headphones.

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I’ve done that. Along with, seems very quiet I’ll turn it up.

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This, and the act of listening for something changes the perception on its own. But some people think they can distinguish the sound of a “burned-in” ethernet cable after six months compared to how “it” “sounded” new

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I use Euphony, but now until V4 comes, I had to change from HQPlayer Embeded to Roon. And have the same experience, that latest Roon plays better than HQPlayer. I don`t know the cause, but I feel it like you.

Any explanation?

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This is the most precise post ever. Its exactly that and nothing more than that. And thats why the constant upgrade bug strikes again and again and the industry explores this human condition to despicable points, yes im talking about cables costing more than an amazing pair of speakers.
Yes i was one of those but not anymore.

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They said in their release notes they significantly changed the streaming & caching structure.

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I think my point was that after mucking around with various sound enhancements for a few years, upsampling, DSP, room correction, I was pleasantly surprised by how good Roon sounds all by itself. It seems to sound better than I remember. Can I prove this? Of course not and all of the points here are valid. But, I was wondering if others have noticed an improvement as of late.

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While I fully agree with Anthro‘s post below, I was also observing Roon to be more flat and sterile as I mentioned in some other posts - that was a continuous observation independent from my daily form or circumstances.
I however notice as well that Roon SQ dynamics have improved with the latest release and the delta to the other software I use has narrowed by quite a bit.

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I often wonder about bit-perfect. Does it exist at all? I have a fairly simple system, but I hear differences between playing the same file from either HDD, SSD, playing from the same disk but through UPnP and/or playing through an app or Roon. Sometimes subtle, sometimes less so. In general I find the sound signature of Roon pleasant and rather consistent, considering I listen to various music

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Yes, and it can be measured and verified. If you can ‘hear’ a difference between an HDD and an SSD, and assuming everything else remains constant, you have something very odd going on.

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I disagree. The path and interface used is entirely different. And so is the buffering and processing. Many options for difference.

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But none that would explain a difference in SQ, at least none that you’ve mentioned so far.

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These things should not affect the delivery of a data unless there is a fault, misconfiguration, or error in software… at this stage we’re not even dealing with a PCM stream.

Roon should not influence sound quality*; what it does is deliver a bit-perfect stream to audio devices.

*Unless applying DSP.

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Yeah right, Martin…
But actually, I don’t agree. And the fact people hear differences can’t be ignored. That said, I am quite happy with your opinion as it is yours. You are the lucky one, because you do not hear the differences.
For me, this discussion ended years ago, when talking about network congestion on 2 Mb/s network traffic in an 11 Mb/s network. Or the difference in FLAC or WAV, both lossless and bit-perfect. I do not care where things happen, but they do.

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I never said anything about hearing. I said: “These things should not affect the delivery of a data…” And if you think a PCM stream derived from either FLAC or WAV sound different, then I’m happy for you to believe whatever you want. When you challenge the incontrovertible, there is little point in discussion.

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Colour me skeptical on that claim, you may think you hear a difference but, played back through the same chain, there’s no difference. Ace a blind test and I’d be surprised and interested.

They’re not ignored, but they can be explained, and that explanation doesn’t require any difference in what you’re hearing.

I’ll quote this rather than repeat, but it’s a belief.

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If you think that lossless compression affects SQ, how about the metadata in the files? Can you hear a difference if the size of metadata and/or its contents is different? Would an A/B test make sense in that case? If that doesn’t strike you as nonsensical, the nothing will, and you can toss all the logic away and go back to astrology and oracles.

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