Hi guys I’m still new to Roon system. I’ve got a microRendu and connected it to my KEF LS50 wireless and made the speakers Roon ready. He speaker supports USB input and has full DAC inside really made my life.
However, I’m considering setting the mR to airplay mode as
I don’t have many stuff higher than 16/44.1 or any up-sampling sofware(HQP);
I can still enjoy the SQ benefits from mR thanks to its dedicated music playback design;
It should be far better than my Apple TV G4 which has only HDMI out put(to use it with the digital interface active speaker I need to split the audio code from HDMI to toslink.
AirPlay is quite versatile if I need to play something outside of Roon.
My question is, if the source file is only 16/44.1, is there any other benefits of using RAAT rather than AirPlay? I can always change it back if I need HiRes capabilities.
Use RAAT via Roon to upsample to the maximum resolution the speakers are capable of dealing with. Your speakers should do this but many report that doing it in software gives better results. If it doesn’t work for you just turn it off. Also do as much as is possible wired. Wireless is great when it works. When it doesn’t it can become really hard to trouble shoot.
I cannot speak for the Pi2, I have never used one but I have messed about with BeagleBone Black and Greens and also Intel powered cards. I had immediate success with an Odroid C2 using DietPi. It worked immediately as an end point and works flawlessly into two DAC’s, one up sampling to DSD128 and the other set to pass through MQA to an Explorer2. No pops, clicks or any suggestion that the hardware is stressed by this. Regardless of hardware, I thing the key is DietPi. It is well supported in matters specific to Roon.
Mm, that’s a valid point. But it’ll be very frastrating for my wife to understand the fuss and get things going… also it’ll be easier for my wife to stream e.g. Spotify to the speakers through mR.
There are very busy, full of advice forums for the microRendu on computeraudiophile.com. You’d have to take your time searching there to find a specific comparison between Airplay/Shairport and RAAT, there are lots of postings that refer to both protocols.
Yes, I agree with the all wired approach. Apple TV, microRendu are all wired.
I also kind of agree the software upsampling might be better than the DAC does(to 24bit/192khz). But will there be any loss for the signal to transfer from my core to endpoint(core is a symbology NAS and has two wired routers till it gets to the endpoint)?
What I am trying to find out is that if RAAT is a far more superior transfer protocol than airplay for red book quality files from merely sound quality perspective, except Roon labels it green instead of purple.