Has anyone noticed a SQ improvement with the new 234 build or switch to TCP protocol from UDP? I spent over 5 hours Wednesday evening listening and I am pretty confident that the sound quality took another positive step. The layering from front to back was better defined with more presence at each level (easier to tell the drummer was clearly behind the singer), also I felt the width of the stage to be wider. I also may have noticed a bit more “pop” to the music, more dynamic, maybe.
I did make one change before realizing that Roon had an update. I went into bios and raised my 6700K clock speed from 4 gHz and voltage from 1.26v to 4.4gHz and 1.30 V. I do not know if that had any effect or not. Logic tells me higher frequency and more voltage makes more noise on the ground plane which should be bad for SQ.
Both versions sounded very good to me, but I noticed the TCP change put a little less load on my imac core as measured by the Roon Signal path in Roon RAAT mode (microrendu).
After the 233/234 upgrade I noticed my imac (2014 imac i5) Roon core signal path went from about 32-35x to around 40-44x on ROON RAAT music files using my microRendu Minimal DSP - just upsampling of flac files, 44.1 to 176.4. Using HQ Player, no change in the signal path measurements were observed. Maybe just a coincidence, but it’s what I noticed on my setup.
One thing I noticed straightway was the lack of drop outs that were previously annoyingly frequent. I am running Roon Core on an Antipodes server, and initially ran it with a PSU from another server (decommissioned) and the sound, from memory, was a bit congested or compressed. Replaced the PSU with a 400watt HDPlex supply and sort of jaw dropping change in quality for the better. Can’t compare TCP/IP with UDP sonically as I was too focussed on drop outs. One thing I did notice with release 234 come to think of it, was an improvement in timing, the music instead of being Hi Fi now has pace or beat to it and has become music. Sort of a Naim type experience I suppose.
I recall that a number of people had router or managed switch “flow control” feature disrupting their Roon setup. I wonder whether this change to TCP might cure that.
Yes @Quadman I have noticed the same SQ improvement as you describe. Actually I used the same description over at Devialet Chat without having seen your comment here. It started with a problem description, but ended up good! https://devialetchat.com/showthread.php?tid=4314
Another evening listening and yes the layering is more pronounced, the singer has more 3d presence, stage is also wider and leading edges are a bit sharper in a dynamic way. I take the 16/44 file from roon and send to HQP where I upsample to dsd512 using the polysnc xtr mp 2s filter. Just stunning sound.
One other thing I noticed is the load amoung the 8 cores is more even then before the TCP switch, before one or two cores would run close to 40%-50% and one to 2 would run near zero now the work is more evenly distributed. Overall workload may be down a bit as well, not much if it is.