Wild Speculation: Full MQA software decode bundled with ROCK [debunked]

I think it’s a great guess, and I don’t much care about MQA. The demonstration I heard did not reveal any differences worth much effort. If I was going to spend $2,500 on a new DAC, MQA-capability wouldn’t factor in my decision.

It would be fun to A/B MQA at home, through Roon, though!

It’s probably just the ability to play the original Joust game on your tablet…

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I suppose my thought process was a bit different late on a Sunday night compared to the harsh light of Monday. :wink:

All meant with good intentions, though I don’t want to annoy the devs since they take enough flak for what might be without receiving nearly enough praise for what is.

Time after time, many wish that the idea of full decoding can happen in software but unfortunately this is not going to happen anytime soon until they decide when if hardware decoding is simply not taking off… probably then they will change their minds.

I foresee no technical barriers except if one want to do DSP/Room corrections prior to playback.

That’s interesting - where are you getting these facts from?

If indeed rock is locked down to the point of no cli and only web based configuration then maybe it’s possible for such software consideration - after all they do it on the Windows and Mac desktop platforms, at least for the first level.

Our preference is to do MQA inside Roon, and not ROCK. We are still working with MQA Ltd on that.

ROCK will always be optional infrastructure for Roon that makes it easy to do things you can do elsewhere with more effort.

Unsure what this new information does to your speculation, but carry on :slight_smile:

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Lol, well this pretty much killed it… but I suppose more speculations will keep floating up. If nothing more, they at least provide more good ideas for the Roon team.

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It has killed it specifically for ROCK, but still plenty of scope for speculation about Roon as a whole!

Thanks for weighing in @danny. I’m glad to hear all developments and features will continue to be shared among all platforms (RoonOS or otherwise). As to the ecosystem advantages for RAAT being a closed protocol (in addition to clock control and other performance parameters), I’m sure you don’t need my input. :wink:

Thanks for all the good work you and your team does.

[Edit: I’ve changed the topic title to indicate the official debunking from the Roon team.]

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I am going to venture a prediction: Once MQA decoding is available in Roon it won’t be long before the ROCKers start requesting/demanding it too.

If the intention is that ROCK is simply a way of providing Roon, then anything Roon will do will automatically be available in ROCK won’t it? They should have identical functionality.

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Agreed. I’m 99% sure Danny meant Roon for all platforms, including ROCK (i.e. not requiring their customized flavor of Linux.)

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Danny is not saying that ROCK users will not have MQA. ROCK is just a limited operating system (it’s not the Messiah !). It will run the Linux version of RoonServer which will provide the same functionality as Windows or Mac RoonServer. Danny is saying that the ROCK OS will not have MQA functions independently of RoonServer.

One of the main design goals of Roon is for an equivalent cross-platform experience. That aim is occasionally compromised but it would be a fundamental change for a particular platform to have an exclusive capability.

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Thanks Andrew for the clarification. I failed (really still do) to see the meaning behind this phrase:

English is not my first language.

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No worries Jose. I just wanted to step in and clarify before anyone (else) got confused.

The source of the confusion is understanding what ROCK is and is not. I suspect that you are thinking of ROCK as another way of running a Core and so you can imagine the possibility of a difference between ROCK and Roon or RoonServer. You may be thinking of ROCK as a single thing and RoonServer as another similar thing.

To others including me, however, ROCK is just a subset of Linux and is like a container. It is designed to hold or run the Linux version of RoonServer (and maybe do a small number of other things, we don’t know yet). ROCK without RoonServer is not a Core; it is just an empty container. Users will never see ROCK without RoonServer however, because RoonServer is built in and installed at the same time as ROCK.

So when Danny says “not in ROCK” he means not in the container as distinct from the contents. The RoonServer in ROCK is just the common ordinary Linux RoonServer. When MQA happens in Roon it will happen across all platforms at the same time (unless, in the famous words of Murray Walker, I’m very much mistaken).

do you think rock will eventually run on a dedicated pc/server instead of using windows or would this bring up a lot of issues?

Me thinks you’ve misunderstood what ROCK is. It’s a Roon-specific OS and won’t be running under any other operating system. So it will be on a dedicated server. That’s the whole point.

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sorry for any confusion,i was just wondering if you had a pc or pc server with no o/s could you use rock as the o/s to just run roon and nothing else so you wouldnt be limited to intel nuc.

Gary in this situation just use the Linux distro of your choosing. And install Roon server for Linux

ROCK is built as a limited hardware support option to remove much of variability of who knows how many variables of diy pc or the numerous proliferation of commercial ones.

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Oh, my apologies!

Don’t know the answer to that one, I think the supported hardware is to be limited to a small subset like NUCs for exactly the reason you mention.

I doubt the team has resources (or desire) to make it compatible with every generic PC. but who knows in the future.

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