I target a level of -23LUFS. However, I notice that the ICC True Peak can be another -15 dB.
Will ICC interfere with volume leveling? I hate having to adjust the volume. Should I disable ICC?
I do not listen loud anyway.
This is actually a very good question. Correct me if I’m wrong but volume levelling in Roon works by altering the original bitstream in some way. It’s seems possible this will “bake in” clipping and now effectively “hide it” under 0db in the volume-levelled version. I’m not a Roon or Lyngdorf engineer but it does seem they may negate each other’s aims.
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Perhaps I should add 3 dB of headroom and re-sample everything to 24/96, which I believe is the “native” resolution of the 1120?
As it turns out, I just got a reply on ICC from Lyngdorf themselves. Basically they are saying that ICC works for any resolution that the Amp can accept provided the file is not upsampled before being presented to the amp. So the worst thing you can do for ICC is to upsample everything apparently! There is some misinformation out there that says ICC only works for 44.1 files, this is not the case according to the reply I got.
What is not clear to me is whether volume levelling is in effect a merthod of digital manipulation that would also obscure intersample peaks.
Given that the amp has 12 db of headroom already built in for ICC I have decided that for album listening I will just disable all DSP and send the native resolution to the Lyngdorf for critical listening. To my ear, placebo or not, it sounds better that way.
Given that you can also send to the amp via airplay, might be worth using that with volume levelling for background playlist type stuff. Just my thoughts!
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However, if I understand correctly, that 12 dB of headroom is dynamic, so it can interfere with Roon volume leveling, causing inconsistent volume.
If you disable all DSP, won’t you also lose RoomPerfect?
Sorry perhaps not clear, my apologies.
I mean I disable all ROON induced DSP at the ROON end, so ICC and RoomPerfect are definitely not impacted…
I’m not sure if volume levelling represents the kind of digital manipulation that would lock in intersample overs, I suspect it would however but would happy to be wrong.
As a result I turn off volume levelling for album listening too.