Well, Roon has MUSE (DSP) presets. You could set up two presets - both the same except that one adds the downmix to mono step (and named appropriately). Thus you would then have Stereo and Mono versions of the same fundamental preset. You could then just switch presets to change from Stereo to Mono and vice-versa. This is not quite as simple as having two endpoints configured on the same physical endpoint device (because MUSE preset selection is effectively buried one level deeper than endpoint selection) but it’s not far off.
I had thought about this before but, since it is not that important to me, I hadn’t bothered to post anything let alone create a thread in Feature Suggestions where suggestions for new features should be added (and voted upon). If someone else took up the idea below and raised it as a feature suggestion, I would not mind - but I, myself, would not vote for it because it is not important to me.
The issue is, as I see it, that, at present, the MUSE presets are ‘all or nothing’. Changing from one preset to another completely replaces the MUSE settings associated with one with the settings for the new selection. This means that, at least for every endpoint that you wish to present stereo and mono alternatives, you need twice as many presets.
A possibility would be to have a secondary category of MUSE presets that can be stacked (or added) on top of the basic MUSE presets. This way I could have, for example, an basic OPRA preset for each of my Headpones/IEMs and a Room Correction preset for my each of my speaker based systems and then a ‘stackable’ or ‘addon’ preset that could be applied (enabled) on top of any of the above (or even the default ‘no DSP’ setting) to convert to Mono. This has the potential to cut down the number of presets that you need to maintain since you would not need Mono and Stereo versions of each and every headphone/IEM preset.
The the first and most obvious problem with this is, as ever, providing suitable control points in the GUI to make the enabling and disabling of the ‘stackable’ presets simple and intuitive. Don’t ask me how I would do it. A couple of ideas come to mind based on what I have seen in other UI’s but I am not a UI expert. It may also get more complicated during preset creation because it is possible that the set of DSP operations allowed for ‘stackable’ or ‘addon’ presets is a subset of those that are possible for the current presets.
There may be another issue with processor utilization. It may not be as efficient to have these stacked presets as it would be to have a single preset which does the same thing and so it is possible, especially with DSD streams, that compute power on the Roon Server may be exhausted sooner than might be anticipated - particularly if you allowed multiple ‘stackable’ or ‘addon’ presets to be applied at once. If this turns out to be significant you then will have a additional support burden with people asking why such and such a combination does not work which may make the idea untenable.
I could think of a couple of other usecases for these ‘stackable’ or 'addon presets as well:
- With headphones/IEMs, adding crossfeed might be something that you would considers as an ‘addon’ or ‘stackable’ preset.
- I might want different PEQ settings for different genre’s of music - e.g. more bass heavy for popular music vs more neutral for classical. With ‘stackable’ presets, the ‘basic’ preset could be used to do room/system correction to produce a neutral sound and then addon PEQ presets could then be used to add the particular audio presentation for each genre of music. Indeed, you could even have different ‘addon’ presets for different people based on their own preferred music presentation. This usecase, coupled with the original mono/stereo use case, is an argument for having the ability to select mutiple ‘stackable’ or ‘addon’ presets to be active on the same stream/endpoint combination at the same time.
In short, any operation that you can imagine wanting to do that is independent of the endpoint system and room correction could be considered as an ‘addon’ or ‘stackable’ preset.