My Configuration has roon server on MacBook Pro. WiiM Pro Streamer and Denafrips Pontus DAC.
The signal path shows Tidal Connect through WiiM Pro and then to the DAC.
I have been listening over a few days and find that the music sounds different when the playback is streaming direct from Tidal Connect to the streamer compared with playing Tidal through Roon.
Why is there a difference?
Does the Roon server stream the Tidal music to the streamer using RAAT?
Welcome to the forum.
Yes, that’s much of the point of Roon.
Please show us a screenshot of your Roon signal path.
Also, what’s your Tidal subscription tier?
And has your WiiM Pro’s TIDAL Connect been updated to a TIDAL Max enabled client?
And have you level-matched the streams?
these types of comments are almost always about loudness. Louder sounds better to the ears.
Exactly!
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The signal path and the tidal subscription tier is Tidal Hifi. So CD quality music.
Can I check if my understanding is correct. If I stream Tidal using Roon, the bytes of music data flows direct from Tidal servers to the streamer encapsulated by RAAT. So RAAT is a network protocol that governs the way Tidal data is being delivered. The music bytes does not flow from the Tidal servers to my Roon server to be delivered to the Wiim Pro.
Might be a technical question. How does RAAT improve the quality of a Tidal stream? I am keen to understand because I can definitely hear the difference. The music seems more defined and transparent in a better way.
No, that is not correct. Whether local files or Internet streams, everything flows through a Roon server. And RAAT is applicable only between server and endpoint on the local network. The Internet at large knows nothing of RAAT.
AJ
I am going to second Andrew. Tidal is streamed from the internet sources TO the RoonServer in Flac. The RoonServer then processes the flac to raw PCM output and that is what is streamed to the endpoint. Part of Roon’s processing will include whatever DSP you are choosing to apply as well as the filter chosen.
So, what is sent by Roon to the endpoint is no longer the actual Tidal stream but processed Audio.
Got it. Thanks.
What the others have said about RAAT. Plus:
It doesn’t as such, but (a) it gives Roon the ability to changed it e.g. with digital sound processing (which you don’t use in your signal path, however) and (b) the implementation on the endpoint differs between Tidal Connect and RAAT, so it is possible that differences occur there.
Finally, we didn’t get answers to these yet, which might also cause differences:
Tidal HIFI tier…
same volume
I don’t just mean same volume setting on the preamp. You may be getting different gain on the same exact set of bits, and louder sound better. So you have to level match precisely to accurately judge any difference in sound quality.
Exactly. And „precisely“ means leveling to about 0.1 dB, difference, and this means using measurement devices and not just the ears and the volume knob.
Understand that louder can prejudice the sound quality to be better. I have not been as precise as both James and yourself. But I do trust my ears to some degree. I don’t own any sound level meters or sound level apps. What do you use?
I don’t do/use anything like this because I don’t greatly care and I’d rather listen to music (and sounds great over here). If you do, an app is not good enough and you need actual calibrated measurement equipment.
It is a fact that you can’t trust your ears for things like this because you can’t consciously distinguish a loudness difference of 0.2 dB and your ears and brain will instead believe they hear a quality difference. This is the whole point of the quote in my post that I linked. For a deeper discussion of this and related topics, here is a link to the article this quote came from:
I never trust my ears. Too many variables from room ,humidity,volume,etc.
