Sound Quality You Can Expect

Hi, I am new with Roon (3rd day of trial).

I got it running alright on a Debian 10 Laptop (6 years ago it was a top laptop).
Music files are on a Synology NAS (FLAC and elder MP3 plus M3U playlists), access via Samba/CIFS.
Network is GB ethernet LAN, switched.
Player is an Onkyo TX-8250.

I succeded in getting the music files and playlists into Roon Server and can play them on the Onkyo via Airplay or Chromecast-built-in.

I usually listen to the music on the TX-8250 via DLNA from the Synology (Media Server software).

Listening to the music roughly gave me the following impression:
Airplay sound was OK, but worse than the other playback options I have.
Chromecast had very good sound quality, comparable to DLNA (without Roon), but sounded different than the usual setup.

Obviously I currently do not have the optimal setup, but in this setup there was no gain in sound quality.
I suppose I can improve a little bit by moving the music files to the Roon machine or by installing Roon on the NAS, but that’s probalby all I can do in that perspective.

What sound quality improvements can I expect with investing into a “Roon ready” receiver (provided it is a good receiver)?

Best regards
Al

I think you’ll find many — if not most — people here are using separate endpoints (ranging from RPi to BlueNote to Lumin) and DACs (there are several very active threads here on this) and amplifiers. So I don’t know personally what you can expect from your integrated chain with built in DAC. I believe both Airplay and chrome cast will be somewhat limiting to hi-res files. But I warn you that this way lies danger- you can spend infinite money on upgrades. So if you want more control, you’ve come to the right place. But I fear that relatively few folks here have a chain like yours and will be able to give much unbiased advice on what you should experience in this environment. Whether you are talking to the “bits is bits” or the “it’s what you hear” teams, neither one is likely to have a similar chain.

I’d advise you to check out a couple of threads here:

And begin to calibrate. Which doesn’t mean that you can’t use Roon with more budget equipment (there’s a fair community of people who use Schiit, Khadas, and other budget equipment scattered around even if in the minority), but I think you’ll find that folks here gravitate to separation of concerns in the audio chain.

Others may have a better concrete answer to the OPs question. Good luck!

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Using wireless infrastructure like airplay or chrome cast wont give you the same quality as possible with a wired connection.

Before investing in a new receiver, why not see what a wired connection from your laptop endpoint to the receiver sounds like?

Does your laptop have an optical output? If so, why not connect that to the receiver optical in?

Does your receiver have a USB input for its DAC? If so, why not connect the laptop via that?

Does your laptop and receiver support Hdmi? If so, why not try that for a wired connection… if not, a cheap breakout box can extract the audio signal from Hdmi and feed it to the receiver.

Any of those will likely give you superior connectivity, and may even allow you break the 44/48 Hz barrier to try out some high res audio files?

If none of that works, you could find something like a used raspberry pi 3 with a hifiberry and use that as an endpoint instead of the laptop for a wired connection, before you invest in a new receiver or streamer.

Finally, even if you don’t perceive an immediate improvement going wired, you’ll benefit from the warm fuzzy feeling affirming you’ve got the best potential solution.

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Sory but Chromecast and airplay is not limited to wireless it pulls data locally to the unit with whatever network connection they use in the ops case wired.

You may well get better sq using a Roon Ready device but you do not need to update the receiver. You can add a seperate streaming device to the optical or coaxial input of your Onkyo or if it has a USB audio input (not for usb sticks) then you could connect using that. Plenty of low cost options using a raspberry pi would suit here.

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Color me corrected. But airplay is still limited to 16/44 regardless of whether wired or wireless. So if OP is trying to obtain the best perceived audio, they might like to try higher resolution files that alternative connection topologies would afford.

Hey, Al! Welcome to Roon!

I ran a TX-8050, an older version of your receiver, for a while. Some thoughts:

  1. Don’t worry about WiFi versus Ethernet. If you’ve got a good WiFi network, there will be no difference in sound between the two. If you get drop-outs and/or clicks and pops with WiFi, you might need a better connection.

  2. DLNA versus Roon. DLNA is a more restrictive version of UPnP, and you can read Roon’s hatred of UPnP here. When DLNA is working well, it will deliver the same bits digitally to the Onkyo, so I wouldn’t expect them to sound different.

  3. Airplay versus Chromecast. Roon really likes the Chromecast protocol, it seems almost as much as they like their own proprietary RAAT protocol, so I’d expect things to work well over that. I imagine Apple and Airplay gives them less flexibility.

  4. NAS files versus local files. Roon hates it when the machine running Roon Core (your old laptop) has to pull files from a NAS. I wound up putting my Roon Core on my Synology NAS temporarily, and then it worked so well, I just left it there.

  5. Roon Ready. This basically allows Roon to control the functions of the receiver. So you can use the Roon remote to turn it off and on, adjust the volume, etc. in addition to selecting which songs to play. It also allows Roon to use their RAAT protocol, which is supposed to be the best thing ever in audio streaming synchronization. But that last is most important if you have multiple sound zones in your house which you want to have all synchronized to play the same thing at the same time.

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Oh, and improving sound quality…

My guess is that what you’ve got now, with respect to Roon and the TX-8250, is just fine. There’s a lot of mythology about “outboard DACs”, and there are lots of people here who like to fiddle around with them, but the built-in DAC in your Onkyo unit is up to handling the task with pretty good fidelity.

Generally speaking, the biggest improvement most people can make is better speakers and adjusting the speakers to the room they’re in. Roon can help with the second part, and there’s lots of advice on this forum about the first part.

Good points, but I would say that “hate” is a strong word. Pulling files from a NAS is way faster/better than streaming them from Qobuz or TIDAL, and Roon loves doing that. Really the only limitation I’ve found with library on a NAS is that I sometimes have to force a rescan after adding new content. No big deal.

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I used the term advisedly.

Fair. Thanks for the reference.

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I’ve spent way too much time reading the forum :slight_smile: .

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As you have been making good experiences with Roon running on a Synology NAS - what NAS do you have in terms of performance. I would love to do it like that but I worry a DS114, MARVELL Armada 370 88F6707, 1.2 GHz, 1 Core, 512 MB won’t be cutting it. What do you use and does it work well performance wise?

Regards,
Christian Gau

Not from my experience having on outboard DAC was a massive improvement on my AV receivers inbuilt one and it’s no slouch of a unit being an Arcam. I put in an Arcam irDAC in front of it to test it out and used the amp direct analoguepath which bypasses any of the AV amps digital processing and it was a revelation. I used an Onkyo before the Arcam but found it was awful for music and the Arcam was my first step back into having decent stereo sound again having got off the train for a free years due to kids and life.

Hello Christian,
from all I know, you need a Synology with Intel CPUs to run Roon on it.
My DS is a DS918+ with INTEL Celeron J3455 (4 cores) 1.5 GHz, 4096 MB RAM.
After the feedback here I intend to install Roon on it (I currently use it only as a file server).
From my experience with the Synology NAS I chose a setup with one RAID1 array of SSDs which contains all the Apps and folders that need to be indexed (e.g. the music library), and a second RAID1 array of disks which contains the backups of the SSDs and other data that does not need the full performance.
This kind of setup gives you excellent performance but is expensive if you have a huge music library. My music library currently needs only 180 GB, but am not finished to replace my old MP3 rips with verified FLAC rips.
I’ll post any performance problems, but am certain that this setup will not get into any troubles running my humble library.
Cheers Al

That’s what I use, but with 8 GB of RAM, not 4.

Hard to say. I built a custom machine with plenty of oomph for my Core, then when I had to fiddle with that machine for an upgrade, I moved the Roon Core temporarily to my DS918+ with 8 GB of RAM, and that worked so well I wound up never moving it off the NAS. I don’t do anything fancy, mainly just 16/44.1 FLAC and Qobuz, with a little DSP to fix some room characteristics in one of my zones. So far, no complaints.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the drama at A&R Cambridge the last 10 years? Considering it’s a boutique audio company founded in 1976, and that founders often start with passion and expertise about the state of the art at that time, but after 30-40 years usually retire or move on. A&R Cambridge was sold to a Canadian firm in 2012, I think, and the reviews on the ASR site of built-in DACs in modern Arcam AVRs are not encouraging. It could get better; it’s now owned by Harman, a holding company owned in turn by Samsung. And Samsung has the resources to do excellent audio, if they cared to.

Similarly, Onkyo almost went bankrupt two or three years ago, and sold the brand to a Chinese company, TCL. Not sure what you get when you buy a modern Onkyo-branded unit, but the older models (pre-2018) are probably still OK, classic Japanese audio engineering.

It’s a minefield out there when it comes to corporate reputations!

Yes I know all about it. It’s a model before the buyout and was well regarded at the time for its stereo playback for music. It’s why I bought it. It’s very good , but I wanted to see if I could make it better and I did with outboard stereo DAC. It’s only used for 5.1 these days as I returned to a full stereo amp setup that made an even bigger improvement.

Thanks for the feedback. Currently Im torn between buying a NUC and install ROCK on it or invest into a more performant NAS. Not sure yet.