I was thinking of having intimate ‘headphones’ parties at home and realized Roon could be very useful here with zone grouping and other options!
Have anyone tried it?
What could be the configuration and product options?
My intentions are -
BYOD Scenario:
If friends come with their own setup connected to their phone could they just install Roon on their device, enable it as a non-private zone and we can all listen together in a synced grouped zone streamed from core?
House provided (probably Bluetooth?) Scenario:
Is there a good setup (one or multiple BT streaming device/s?) I could buy to be able to stream to bt headphones directly from Roon?
Is there a Bluetooth streamer that could stream to multiple BT headphones simultaneously?
If not can I connect multiple BT streamers to the PC and group them with Roon?
My concerns:
Is there a limitation other than CPU/MEM resources for Roon core to be able to handle multiple devices with DSP enabled?
In terms of CPU - If DSP is enabled for binaural and upsampling at the same rate for all zones in a grouped zone, would Roon core upsample the playing track once for all zones or once for each zone in the group?
How many phones/devices would you estimate an i7 Roon core support simultaneously?
For BYOD - Would all phones with Roon installed be able to control the playlist? Is it configurable?
Could BT zones and Roon on phone zones be grouped together?
I am familiar with this model and have considered it. I would prefer an open transmitter (Bluetooth I guess) that could be used with different vendors and models.
For the first scenario (BYOD with quality gear) I hope phones (with DACs & AMPs) as endpoints in a grouped zone could do the trick nicely. What do you think?
I can’t see why that wouldn’t work. It seems a little gear-heavy, but then LAN parties were popular at one point, too…
The hand-out-headphones-at-the-door way seems more elegant to me. As an aside, though I understand the desire for silence and ultra-high listening quality, isn’t a lot of the pleasure of sharing music being in the same physical and headspace, fully sharing the experience?
Definitely.
Consider after party hours were it would be rude (and illegal) to continue using loudspeakers in an apartment building… Or a shared listening session for headphones buffs
For sure! That’s the second scenario I was looking at, just hoped to find open alternatives to Sennheiser’s RF models.
What about a practical limit for grouped zones in Roon (with DSP)?
The upsampling will only happen once, the other stuff (probably lighter weight) may be repeated per zone.
You haven’t provided enough information to answer this question. It will depend on which i7 you have, how much processing you’re doing, how many distinct streams are playing, etc, and it quickly gets too difficult to call precisely. There’s a decent chance that your networking infrastructure will fail before Roon fails, especially if there is WiFi involved.
Yes, all would be able to control. No, not configurable.
Nothing’s going to stop you from doing that, but it will only sync properly if the whole bluetooth stack across various devices is reporting its output delay properly. No idea how true that is in practice across a diverse set of products.
Perhaps im stating the obvious here, but certainly your guests have their smartphones, and Roon app can playback to all mobile devices today. I’d say you will experience sync issues between platforms and hardware. It might look a bit strange if you are planning on letting your friends take to the dance floor, though!
Suppose your router will need to be of a pretty decent model to be able to maintain WLAN streaming to more than a few portables at a time. (RAAT uses TCP in this scenario too?)
I’d love to know how you go if/when you try it. Like how many endpoints end up working work, doing exactly what DSP and if your network (WiFi?) can keep up.
Time to push your network and i7 petal to the metal
I probably should mention how the above (kind of) relates to your topic. I’m in an apartment at the moment too and often thought how I can have friends over to watch a movie or live game late at night, in addition to maybe doing some live DJ mixing with friends, using my Roon (Tidal) library - all without disturbing the neighbours
There are solutions but it would be nice to have everything done through Roon for the best SQ.
There will be new hardware (DACs and endpoints) coming that will allow sound and picture to be sent over the network, that will use ‘virtual sound cards’ that will (in parallel) also be RAAT endpoints, so should give me what I want but I will need new hardware. This solution will send sound and picture to the endpoint but not via Roon itself, even if it will also be a RAAT endpoint. Check out Merging’s ‘Zman’ board/module and also this interview below. But that will require new hardware and there’s no timeline yet on when the first product/s will be available.
Damned Sean, you made me look like an old bugger now
I was referring to the dance floor when half of the participants have a lag in their endpoint of half a second! Makes me car sick almost!
jokes, he is awesome.