But I thought you’ve just got Roon as well as a network bridge.
The above discussion suggests that Roon should potentially improve SQ in several ways:
by transcoding FLAC to wav and giving the 272 DAC less processing to do
by DSP such as room correction? (I haven’t looked into what these DSP options are in Roon)
by doing the MQA first unfold and sending higher bandwidth files to the 272 if you use Tidal
by giving access to Qobuz Studio if you use Qobuz - and thus many hires files
Or have I misunderstood?
If there’s no significant upgrade, as Guinless suggested, that’s good news for me as that’s the only reason I’d do it. This would also support what ChrisU says about finding higher bandwidth than CD not much better in SQ.
By the way, I seem to recall that the digital audio expert Hans Beekhuysen says on some of his videos that these network bridge products or Roon endpoints sometimes do need to be set to full volume - I get the impression that this somehow makes them put less changes into the signal and thus removes another chance for a bridge pot to screw up the signal. (or something like that)
Ah - sorry, I didn’t know you already had Roon.
Good luck with the set up.
Jim
(Now about to cycle home from the office after a month of strict abstinence, wondering whether to have a glass of wine.)
This used to happen to me with my UniQute also. Usually a reboot of the Sonore or the Roon Core sorted it but I was never quite sure if one or the other was the problem I’d always restart the Sonore first (software restart the full reboot).
Would a Zen work plugged into a 272 via optical cable? Would I need anything else, apart from Roon? I don’t have a switch…just 40MB BB from a standard PlusNet router.
Or just £75 on a raspberry pi with a hat on…
My issue most times seemed to be due to MQA and high res files as my UniQute was an original one so limited to 24/96 - but MQA should have worked in this case.
Do you think it is changing resolution that is causing your issues?
It’s a switch which this forum likes. It gives a much cleaner signal to the streamer (less noise means better SQ). In your case both the Zen and the 272 will benefit.
No, the 2960 is a fairly standard managed layer 2 edge switch. The design of the PCB with respect to the Ethernet interfaces, and perhaps the stability of the PHY serial clock helps to reduce the amount of FM artefacts passed along the Ethernet serial twisted pair links. These artefacts would otherwise couple into the attached devices.
You don’t actually need to. Storage is pretty cheap these days. High res files tend to be FLAC for download reasons. I rip all my CDs in aiff (the Mac equivalent to wav files).
I’ve done some casual comparisons between a flac and its aif file. To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference on basis of casual listen. Likely, I wouldn’t generally be able to tell the difference even if I listened carefully.
Still, since storage is cheap, I feel more comfortable avoiding one extra processing step.
Every now and then, I used to get skipping when running Roon on a Mac mini. Just reboot the mini.
If you have a good NAS (ie with a good processor), you do not need the Mac. You can run Roon Core on the NAS (QNAP or Synology). That goes straight in the the Sonore then from there into your DAC. Much more solid this way. Also, running Roon on the NAS, with the database on a RAM disk, you get really fast response time from Roon - at least when compared to the previous generation of minis. Never tired it with the new minis, but I suspect that running off the NAS will be faster.
Oh and by the way, no more skipping since I’ve moved the core to the NAS. None, ever.
However, (there’s always a but :)), since a few months, Roon seems to eat away the NAS (QNAP) RAM memory to the point that the NAS slows down to a crawl. So, about once a month, you need to stop Roon core on the NAS and restart it - takes about 2 seconds - to restore all the available system memory.
Roon is aware of this. I presume they’ll work it out and resolve it.
So is your skipping on certain format types?
What is the output of the UPnP Bridge set to - WAV or LPCM
DOP on or off?
For the Roon Endpoint is FLAC compression on or off?
During playback of a track that skips, what is the status of the buffer on the Naim network player.
Have you switched on any Roon DSP for the Endpoint, are you getting a ‘Processing speed’ number, if so what it is - this is less than 2 you are over working the Roon Core.
Bizarre, never heard of skipping on Roon Core… might be a bug with old software… must admit on my mid sized iMac Roon Core runs in the background and I don’t notice its there… it just works… as doesn’t affect anything else running on the iMac
The most intensive load I created to try and break things was a DSD stream with complex EQ processing and levelling, and the processing multiplier dropped to 8x, normally it runs at 30x to 40x with PCM … but all works without hiccup or drawing attention to itself.
