And the Denafrips Terminator and Terminator Plus…
Love my Meridian DSP SE that does it all, DAC, upsample, apodise and enhanced bass alignment all in one package. The sound of Roon is superb as is.
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I want a Cord DAVE & M Scaler, buuuut, that’s a out of my budget, but I can dream 
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Anyone here using (or not using) room treatments to make Roon sound better?
I have the Hugo TT2 & MScaler. Sublime! 
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Can you please tell me how you ripped the SACD’s or were they hybrid with a CD layer? Thanks.
I read about that combo, it sounds stellar, lucky you, Black or Silver ?
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Yes it exceeds the audio spectrum and if that was all that matter you’d be correct. But oversampling is a vehicle to better reproduce the original waveform and especially the transients which are critical to your brain correctly creating the sound stage and getting instrument timbre right. If you’re interested here’s a link to the slides from a Rob Watts talk about the tech and methods the Chord Dave/Blu combo (which upsamples to 705kHz) uses to do this. It’s quite technical but very interesting and anyone that has heard these products (or the newer Hugo TT / mScaler) would agree that it delivers greatly improved results.
Yo’ll need to scroll down a bit to get to Rob’s slides…
Black 
And I can’t imagine just how much better DAVE/MScaler would sound?
To me, at least, TT2/MScaler is my ‘endgame’.
I read about both combos, and they are both fantastic, I believe your combo rated just above a Dave by itself, absolutely fantastic.
To the OP: “it depends”. And I used to be for years a firm proponent of “rip and stream has to be better” school.
My (good) dedicated CD transport with a decent SPDIF IC is marginally better than my Antipodes EX ripped CD with USB out into the same DAC, CD ripped by Antipodes or by my PC (I cant tell the difference).
But I have heard a significant difference (in favor of the CD transport) with one (not all!) much more expensive SPDIF cable.
Still I find this inconclusive because I know i can further improve the Roon side by inserting a Roon endpoint between Antipodes EX (now running as both Core and endpoint) and DAC.
I am not sure this “series” converges to a single conclusion 
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My CA 851N has selectable filters. I have found the difference among them to be essentially imperceptible. Unlike analog transducers like speakers and phono cartridges, where extended frequency range correlates with better performance within the audible spectrum, in digital, performance is always bit perfect.
I am, however, in my mid 50s so there may be some effect at frequencies above 15k that I cannot hear.
Again I have listened to tracks that sound as good or better in MP3 encoded levels than the same track encoded without compression and much higher bit depth, though admittedly this is rare given that most MP3 are horrendously compressed and dead. It drives home the point that the most important part of the reproduction process is the original master!
That’s hard to believe. Are you sure you were comparing tracks coming from the same master / release? Great masters sound great in MP3 and can be better than poor masters in hi-res. But I doubt same master would sound worse in higher res - if anything it should be the same.
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Thats the point they probably are not. Its hard to know what the master is! Is it the original or is 3 3 remasters later? Rarely is that info available. Again it’s very rare. The one that comes to mind right aways an Ella Fitzgerald I downloaded from Amazon a while ago. The fidelity was astonishing. On the other hand everything from Apple store has always been trash though I havent heard anything from there in years. Not only is it compressed to the max its further processed to boost the lows. Simply awful. On the other hand Amazon has some decent MP3 and now have have HD of course.
Can you please tell me how you ripped the SACD’s or were they hybrid with a CD layer? Thanks.
There are two ways:
one is to use an early model Sony PS3 with a SACD-compatible transport, but it’s fairly annoying, stops working if the firmware was updated past a certain point, and those are notoriously fragile anyway.
a much better way is to use a universal Blu-Ray/SACD player that uses the MediaTek MT8560 or MT8580 Blu-Ray player chipsets, then use the sacd_extract method as described here:
I used two old-new stock Sony BDP-S590 and BDP-BX59 players purchased from Amazon in 2019 (they’re really the same model, with different SKUs for different markets). You boot them from USB stick with the sacd_extract software, then copy the DSD stream (either the stereo or the surround one) to the network in ISO format. It’s a bit clunky, as I am skipping some of the tedious details I don’t completely remember (hence the two players to parallelize the work and get better throughput). The ISO can then be converted to DSF format, that Roon and others like my Onkyo DP-X1 recognize.
You can no longer buy those new, at least not from Amazon, but the BX59 is still available used for a reasonable price (I had paid $250 for my NOS BX59, and $75 for a certified refurb S590):
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Yea, this is a major limitation of streaming services. No info on release version, but mostly limited selection. If you have a favourite album and want the best quality release, it’s probably not available on streaming services. I can give you lots of examples from Tidal where MQA sounds worse than an older release, just because MQA versions are typically done from remasters that typically suck.
It’s some work, but if you go to album credits in Roon, there should be a product number of the album. This works also for content on Tidal, not sure about other services (don’t use them). Then using sites like discogs and dr.loudness-war, you can check what kind of release is that and what is it’s dynamic range - that can give you some direction.
Tidal dies indeed give you dynamic range info which can be used to compare versions. The info seems to be pretty accurate though I have no clue how its derived. I guess that its part of the algorithm.
This is the best thread ever for information on ripping SACDs:
It cost me all of $50 to rip my entire SACD collection to DSD64 files.
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You guys just piqued my interest. How about DVD A to stereo?
I love your pussy. Is it a Ragdoll? A Snowshoe? It’s definitely a pointed/bicolour of some breed. Before I showed bred Lhasa Apso (my dream) I bred Persians.