I am slowly developing my audiophile skills, but I’m not quite there yet. I bought a Nucleus because of the price point, and it seemed to be adequate for my needs. I can imagine wanting possibly six zones in my house. Currently I have two Roon-ready devices, and I am slowly replacing my Sonos devices. I can group Sonos speakers and stream to them from Roon, but I can of course never stream simultaneously everywhere in the house with Sonos still in the mix. One of my Sonos devices was a PORT which allowed streaming to two very good Adam speakers that I have. I successfully swapped that out for a Bluesound NODE device which is Roon-ready. I might consider one of the Bluesound speakers+NODE packages to replace other Sonos speakers.
Another possible audiophile need is to expand my current music station consisting of a Kawai electric keyboard, an Apollo X4 UAD, and my Adam speakers and sub, and a Mac mini running Logic Pro (most likely).
Given the above, is the Titan of any advantage to me? I’m having a little trouble reading and understanding the technical capabilities of the Titan as compared to the Nucleus. In what ways can I improve my listening experience throughout the house? Or can it improve how I use something like Logic Pro to record my own music?
Unless you use DSP, there is no real benefit in upgrading the server, even if you have many zones, since it only comes down to bandwidth, and that should be enough for a wired gigabit network and a local HDD or SSD.
The Titan has better/newer hardware, but AFAIK does not have any added functionality or anything. It’s just faster, but you will only notice that if you are used to pushing the Nucleus really hard. In other words, is the Nucleus underperforming for you in any way or do you have a case of Itching Wallet Syndrome?
Marian thank you. This response is helpful. So, perhaps for a while I should narrow my focus to understanding what DSP can do? Currently, it is an obscure acronym to me. Digitally process to what end? Is this only interesting to audio professionals? Can you offer me a toe in the door to this larger world?
What gives me pause in deciding “no I don’t need a Titan” is when I start to look at the incredible depth and breadth of DSP features in the MUSE suite. It’s all completely Greek. I have 25 years in software development, and all of intros and summaries I see assume vast knowledge of DSP before you read paragraph 1.
Sorry but no. This is all pretty forward and more than perfectly understandable to someone with 25 years in software development. Most of the elderly non-computer persons on the forum figure it out.
Convolution is a powerful signal processing technique commonly used for room correction, headphone listening, or surround processing.
Headroom Management is defined as:
Digital signal processing can result in “clipping”, or audio samples that exceed the allowed range. These samples are “clipped” to a maximum or minimum value. In some cases, this can produce audible distortion. This is easily avoided by slightly attenuating the signal – to make “headroom” for sample values that may increase as a result of signal processing.
Now mind you, I spent 25 years writing education software for autistic children, and application platforms to support same. Not really in the same sphere of knowledge.
In the case of Convolution, if you state that concepts such as “room correction” and “surround processing” will simply explode into my consciousness as I read further I will trust you and read further. But I think all of these definitions could benefit from a layperson’s description of what I as a listener will actually perceive as being different or better.
Most of what I did as a software developer was bridging the gap between domain experts (PhDs in autism) and what was possible to achieve with lines of code. Really, what I did was a whole lot of human to human communication. In the end, the code wasn’t that complicated.
Well, if a term is entirely unfamiliar and you can’t imagine what it might be, it may help reading some third-party definition. E.g., this is what I get with a quick lookup on the Mac:
If you enter an unfamiliar term into the forum search, you will typically find discussions, e.g.,
The “clipping” I would have thought is well known because it’s a behavior that has been with us in every form of sound reproduction, not just digital but also analog. In particular to a developer who is aware of data types and the problems posed by fitting numerical values into available bits.
Maybe I’m underestimating the challenge if it’s totally new to someone, but the explanation in the documentation seem quite clear: “Digital signal processing can result in “clipping” … this can produce audible distortion … easily avoided by slightly attenuating the signal”
I’m also new in DSD.
What I don’t understand in the signal pad you show is why there is first a bit depth conversion from 24 bit to 64 bit and two steps further again ( but then from 64 to 32 bits).
I also see this happening in my signal pads.
What’s the reason for this?
Many thanks.
I use a Roon One feeding a Naim NDX2 Network player with no sonic limitation problems on a McIntosh C2700 Preamp, 2 x MC611 Monoblocks driving Focal Sopra No3 loudspeakers 7 2 x REL S/812 Subwoofers. Dedicated 20-amp lines for both the Front & back end of the system.
Unless you have an enormous music library, then spend your gear money on room treatments, a decent ethernet cable, better power cords, or some hi-res music downloads.
I would not consider upgrading my Roon One until I made a significant upgrade to both my network player & preamp.
Because Roon converts to 64 bit before every DSP in order to minimize the effects of the small but inevitable mathematical errors when performing DSP calculations. This way, they get pushed into the least significant bits of the 64 data bits and become inaudible. After the DSP, it is converted down again because there is no DAC in the world that accepts 64 bit Float input. The final bitsize is usually the maximum that the DAC accepts (or as configured in the endpoint settings in Roon)
