A friend of mine gave me a pair of Maggies that his wife could not tolerate looking at, FREE SPEAKERS, YAY! They sound pretty good to me.
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Yup, particularly with regard to headphones.
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Somehow I am not surprised.
There is some lower limit below which you arenāt getting good enough materials and workmanship (for DACs it seems to be around $10 though), but above it youāre really paying (at best) for features, convenience, esthetics and alike. Or, quite often, for nothing at allā¦
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@Boris_Molodyi & @Alan_Barnard You guys crack me up! 
thatās the best laugh Iāve had since the butcher called to tell me my prosthetic tongue kept licking the economy burgers rather than the wagyu because despite it being designed to distinguish 98million chemicals and nearly 20 billion flavor combinations it couldnāt tell which tasted better!
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Itās a good thing we have price tags to tell us how things sound!
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Well Qobuz is $12.99 per month and ROON is $14.99 per month soā¦ā¦
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Thereās your answer! No need for further discussionā¦ 
It must be because I went lifetime at Ā£499 that makes it sound so much sweeter to me than you then!
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Thatās it in a sentenceā¦. A life sentence!
I can just picture a very proper audiophile connoisseur tasting two pieces wagyu at a restaurantā¦ rolling his eyes, smacking his lips, making notes that the piece on the right came from a cow that had been properly massaged by Japanese virgins while the piece on the left most certainly had been touched only by a grumpy old farmerā¦
All the while the cook defrosts yet another slab of frozen bovine carcass from the local distributor ā "this piece will be wagyu, and this one that fell on the floor will be USDA Prime.
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yes, but then test and verify 
Nice test and your results agree with my ears.
But there isā¦ itās just not that more equals better. There are clear āvalueā players in this market that punch way above their price point. Some of them are still āexpensiveā if you try to compare like price vs. like performance. Price is a bit irrelevant but finding something that matches personal taste within a budget is still important. Donāt settle for cheap to save a buck if youāve not listened to the thing you could stretch and obtain. You may find that thing, if you stretch a little, truly punches well above its price point. Also, nice cables make me happy. Music sounds better when Iām happy. No bit of test equipment will help you confirm that.
Anywayā¦ to OPā¦ @Tim_Ashley I was thinking of this the other day. As part of Roon Ready, Roon Labs requires they retain a sample of every Roon Ready component. Iād open a support ticket and ask them to test this. There have enough reports here this sound quality difference is probably a bug they need to take back to Cambridge. At least they might extend your trial while they have a chance to test.
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A very sensible suggestion - and thank you - but alas too late since my trial has expired.
I remain fascinated by ROON as a business model in that it mostly consolidates information available elsewhere and painlessly links it to the sources it finds but its failure to cover multi home without a degree in Router Management and ISP Relations knocks it out of contention. As does its inability to knock selections (favorites etc) back to Qobuz. As does the way that for whatever reasons it sounds worse on my system.
Iād happily pay for it if the above werenāt the case. It looks and feels good. But its business model seems aimed at people who keep a lot of music locally and who live in one place - and I am not that person.
Well, certainly. As Iāve mentioned, there are esthetics, convenience, etc. Iāve paid for those āfancyā cables for one of my systems, because they run along the window in the open, so I wanted something both well-made and nice looking. They donāt make the sound any different, but they are more pleasing to look at, so there is some value there. But if we get back to purely audio quality, there is no clear correlation there. Apart from products that specifically aim for some āhouse soundā (some people pay big money for vacuum tube ampsā¦ or even DACs, which is a completely baffling idea), above certain threshold of parts and assembly pricing that gets you an accurate and decently designed product, you may get some slight improvement. Or not. You might get something significantly worse, too (thereās a fun thread on ASR about the āworst measuring speakers.ā Some of the worst are priced at hundreds of thousands $); now, it might sound reasonably pleasing, just like tube distortion might be pleasing, but I donāt think thatās what you expect paying 100xā¦
This gets way off topic though of sound difference between playing Qobuz direct vs. through Roon. Which, if anything, would be rather difficult to actually do, unless the device manufacturer purposely runs any Roon signal through some special DSP that makes sound worse (but then, howād they get through Roon certification?), but this would be noticeable on anything played through Roon. The vehemence with which people purporting to hear such difference reject even an idea of a proper blind tst is also amusing.
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Have you tried cable ladders?
I believe the speakers are not a variable so it doesnāt matter what they are.
Alanās experiment does not show what the problem is, it shows what the problem cannot be. He did not claim more than this.
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Tried those. Tried green markers CD demagnetizers, lots of things. Still have a few MIT cables around (well, those at least have something inside them that could theoretically affect the sound. Mostly out of curiosity, because I actually studied physics and have professors of acoustics in the family.
Quite obviously and expectedly, none of them had 1/100th of the effect putting some acoustic panels behind Maggies had.
Although sometimes I think I should get into HiFi accessories business myself. After all, if people are actually paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars for ādirectionalā electrical cables, I can certainly put that money to a better use! And it is even legal!
I wanted to try it but I couldnāt find the right cableā¦.
I had the CXNv2 and it upsamples all sources as you describe and show, it uses dual Wolfson WM8740 series DACs, upsamples everything to 384k, and uses a relatively gentle reconstruction filter. Itās a really nice device.
I now have the EVO 150 which has an integrated and matched preamplifier and power amplifier. The EVO uses an ESS Sabre ES9018K2M DAC and the manual says nothing about upsampling and the signal path display does not show upsampling. The digital paths in these two devices are really not comparable.
But the OP says he hears a difference between the AirAble implementation of Qobuz in StreamMagic and Roonās Qobuz stream. Cambridge switched to Airable (Services | airable) in StreamMagic a few firmware releases ago to support more diverse source choices with likely less maintenance headaches.
Find a test recording on Qobuz and send it through both paths. Use the digital-out to listen through an off-board DAC. And if you have the tools and skill, compare the byte stream from both sources as passed through the EVO digital-out.
I use Roon via RAAT to the EVO 150. I play Qobuz, Tidal, and local tracks mixed into playlists and enjoy the platform. I use Roon convolution with a custom curve to correct for room problems. Qobuz via StreamMagic by comparison sounds a bit harsh, since the room remains uncorrected. This is also true for Chromecast and AirPlay.
Until Cambridge adds Dirac room correction to the EVO, Roon is the only practical way to both correct for the room and benefit from the excellent digital-analog signal path that the EVO provides. Roon has a pretty diverse set of digital sources. But when I want to listen to vinyl, AirPlay, or Chromecast from a mobile device, I donāt have room correction. I have live with that.
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This is why I am looking to move to NAD from my Naim and a few other reasons for good measure.
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I have two DIRAC NADs, paid the extra for the full range. Best thing ever.
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