Roon SQ Discussion Thread (Abandon hope all Ye who enter ...)

[gmt]

Roon 1.3 contains upsampling and filtering DSP. It’s a good implementation, but has fewer options than HQP. When any DSP functions are operative then Roon will no longer be producing bit-perfect output and the purple light won’t appear in the footer. So what will appear ? Wait and see. I think you’ll like it.

Will this make larger demands on the Core? Does the same apply to MQA software decoding?

Cheers
Tom

[evand]

If you use the capabilities it will place additional demands on the core.

[Sloop_John_B (John B)]

I’m afraid using my powers of deduction and observation I have failed to spot this intriguing sneak preview!
.

.sjb

[Rusty_Miller]

One guy’s SQ experience:

Former Setup: ethernet line serving flac files from a Vortexbox Appliance running Logitech Media Server into the Bridge II renderer in a PS Audio PWDII DAC. Best SQ came from file playback (mostly redbook). Tidal streams were close but not as detailed as flacs from the hard drive. Playing Tidal from a Macbook Air > USB > PWDII DAC was a distant third place.

Then along came MQA, which necessitated playback via Macbook > USB > DAC. And it bettered my best! Even through USB. Revelation. Best SQ I’d ever had in the home.

Which prompted last week’s major upgrade to running Roon on a SmallGreen Sonictransporter i5. In its first configuration I compared Tidal streams to file playback, pointing Roon to the same flac files on the still-router-connected Vortexbox. Suddenly, Tidal was clearly better than local file playback in A/B/A testing across multiple tracks!

Then last night, directly attached to the Sonictransporter a USB drive that I’d used for VBA backup…

Voila! Local file playback is once again superior to Tidal, not drastically but discernibly. This is the best sound quality I have ever enjoyed at home in seven years of computer audio! I am giddy to think about the gains from MQA software decoding through Roon 1.3.

[Armin_Moesslacher]

it is called expected expectation

participated in 20 double blind tests

[miguelito (Miguel Barrio)]

It’s your audio endpoints that need tuning. Roon should just deliver the file.

Essentially right. The observation I originally made was that, using the same computer I run Roon core in also as an audio endpoint, and comparing the SQ between that and A+, I preferred A+. And comparing Roon+HQP to A+, it was a bit of a wash, also using the same computer as endpoint.

[jussi_laako (Jussi Laako (Signalyst))]

I’ve read the manual and I know it’s not supposed to do anything to the PCM upsampling but it does. Others have reported this as a bug. I think it might be just a volume difference but it could be more.

It locks volume control to -3 dBFS setting for PCM sources, so you don’t get surprising volume changes when going between PCM and DSD sources. That’s all it does.

[evand]

while the client (a networked RoonBridge) can be a low-power, low-noise device that has do to very little processing (SBC+RoonBridge+DAC or integrated as RoonReady device).

and on that note, this is pretty telling:

I want a new Roon endpoint that is not a computer

I have no sound quality preference when it comes to these things, aside from being aware of the issues with USB and high rate DSD/DXD mentioned earlier in the thread.