Where are improvements to sound quality?

My other half once commented saying "you listen to equipment not music’, which I think is insightful. Perhaps we are to busy looking for what we think is utopia and in doing so miss the pleasure of music?

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Not quite. Yes, it upsamples, but it does a ton more than just that; very complicated digital filtering as well.

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Sure, Mike, I generally agree. But your bank doesn’t run the same software on different operating systems. Bugs exist; OS interactions do happen. I was trying to take @Ed_Kwok’s comment in good faith, and try to figure out what could be causing it. The only possible way they could sound different would be to have different bits generated.

I’d also recommend switching from aromatic olive oils for cooking, to something more neutral, like canola oil.

That really depends on what it is that you are listening to. Italian opera goes great with the aroma of olive oil. As i said this is new area and completely open to experimentation. Here are few things I’ve learned thus far:

New age music and scented candles are perfect together.
Lounge or cocktail jazz goes well two long white odorless (or so they claim!) candles in pewter holders.
And all jam bands are amazing with cannabis smoke.

Please let me know what you have discovered!

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Just use Audirvana. It can handle VST. Done ! And side benefit of no horizontal scrolling ! Bye Roon !

I think you’re confusing over sampling with up sampling. Over sampling applies mostly to reading the media. Up sampling artificially increases the amount of information and can be applied through many algorithms that may or may not make any improvement in the sound quality, might actually sound worse. In my experience, going from ROCK to RoonOS—meaning using a Nucleus—makes a very repeatable improvement in sound quality. The things you mention all fall under theoretical information theory, though some DAC makers like to use then because the numbers look “better” on their marketing materials, kind of like Total Harmonic Distortion in the 1970’s.

Sound Quality is an important subject to me and the database that Roon offers also. This brings me often into choice conflicts :wink:
Sound is recreated by good equipment. Streams go without any processing to the DAC.
I love to know who are playing and links to other music and the neat integration of external streams with my own music stored in the local network as Roon does perfectly!
(Roon core is running on a Synology disc server to reduce the processor load on the Auralic network streamer).
Other moments I prefer the best sound quality from my Auralic equipment and then I have to switch to “Lightning Device” from Auralic itself. Here also an other UPNP app like Bubble DS can be used to let the Auralics manage the music.
When the sound quality could be at the same level then it would be easy to stick all the time to Roon. So please bring here an upgrade.
This brings me also to the idea that when Roon would have a selection possibility to an UPNP protocol the best audio level from Auralic could be used. If this is like logic then it is now on top of my wish list.

LOl.Yes i would suspect so .Ive not heard the Hugo scalar but someone should get their Audio Precision
analyzer out and test it. I havent seen any test yet.

Maybe it makes the music more forward,louder,etc.

I do not use Roon DSP because I found the lossless sounds better to me. I have some Auralic equipment that offers DSP and don’t like that either compared to lossless.

By the way , I really like Chord products and have a Qutest in my main setup.

Yes, I am talking about up-sampling, which in Roon improves very little, more in JRiver with SoX and even more with HQPlayer and some of their algorithms. And I am not saying this is facts, but thats what my ear tells me in my system, and others are free disagree.

As I mentioned earlier: the best way to handle us audiophiles is to give us a lot of options. Some want vanilla bit-perfect with no DSP, volyme levelling or similar things. Some (like me) likes to improve the sound with DSP based on room and acoustics, and yes even up-sampling.

And some (and I shudder) likes vinyl, but I guess that’s a little outside what Roon can do for us :slight_smile:

Listening in a vacuum is the best - a TOTAL absence of noise…

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Roon has a plug-in architecture to allow third parties to write modules that can do the kind of things that you ask. You have to remember that Roon is not a music-playing application. It’s a platform to support both local and remote streaming and transcoding—which includes up sampling and downsampling—data from point A to point B. The kinds of features your discussing are orthogonal to Roon’s raison d’etre though the architecture allows anyone who can program to extend the feature set. I say this as an audiophile who also writes DSP-oriented software and has a very large vinyl collection. :slight_smile: Also, FWIW, most audiophiles consider extensive features to be anathema and prefer anything that resembles “straight wire with gain”, but YMMV.

I find listening in a vacuum kind of dull since the music has no sense of air. Kind of a sucked out sound.

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I’ve long ago came to peace with the following: Roon is best skilled at developing the overall library of experience and hqplayer is most skilled at sound quality. I’d prefer both stay in their lane and do what they do best rather than waste energy on something that is not their forte. Specialization is not a bad thing, especially with small companies like these.

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The aroma, yes, but I’m talking about the acoustic impact of olive oil vapor versus canola oil ((2R,5S,10S)-2-Isopropenyl-6,10-dimethylspiro[4.5]dec-6-ene) vapor. Olive oil contains a godforsaken mix of esters of various acids, along with a significant amount of squalene, which you can tell by the name is not something you want in your acoustic environment. The aroma you prize is from the phenolic compounds, not as much as the squalene, but still noticable. All of these molecules bouncing around in the air will produce significant audio effects, no doubt!

I thought ROCK was Roon OS. No? I’m kind of confused about this.

My understanding is that ROCK is a general-purpose OS designed by Roon for Intel chips in general, but that the Roon OS that comes with the Nucleus[+] is designed and built to be hardware-specific, hence the higher performance and sound quality.

Roon has never proclaimed added SQ benefits for either ROCK or Roon OS.

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ROCK is a do-it-yourself build of Roon OS. The Nucleus is an Intel NUC in a fancy case. In particular, it’s fanless — which means a lot if you’re locating it in your listening room, but very little if it’s in another room of the house.

I think the performance and sound quality would be identical other than the Nucleus is fanless and you don’t have to install anything yourself. Having just purchased and installed a Nucleus, the $1119 price was well worth it for me. Others will prefer the lower cost DIY option. Either option is superior to running Roon on a Windows computer in my experience.

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