DSP on Roon

What are people doing with their DSP settings on Roon?

I’m not technical enough to understand what I’m actually doing so am leaving everything as is and letting it chose the settings as appropriate on Tidal and Qobuz.

Am I missing a trick?

You neither state what your system is not what you wish to achieve. This makes it difficult to answer your question.

Apologies - my question was more generic than that and I was ‘just’ interested in people’s views and experiences.

I’ve only had my Nucleus for a matter of days and am very happy with it, I have no complaint but was curious as to whether certain DSP settings were used commonplace in the community.

My system is in flux at the moment as I am going through some upgrades but within a matter of weeks I will be as follows

Rega 6
NDX2
250DR
282
H/Cap DR x 2
Napsc
Wilson Benesch Arc (which I will be changing at some point in the next few months)

I use Roon DSP to reduce a room ‘mode’ and add a touch of brightness for my hearing.
I have Roon convert DSD instead of letting the Naim nDAC doing it as I prefer the sound.
AAC/MP3 radio I oversample to the maximum which takes the edge of the coarseness.

Other than that the wonderful Naim DAC does the rest
:slightly_smiling_face:

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You are not missing a trick. Personally I don’t think the Naim streamers are likely to benefit from DSP shenanigans (such as upsampling), although you might consider room correction if you have exhausted the usual speaker position tweakery and any room treatment that might be practical and/or acceptable.

I’d suggest turning on volume levelling too if you haven’t already. It’s DSP, but not usually thought of as such. If you don’t like it, turn it off again!

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You can do nothing with it and not really “miss” anything. The suggested volume leveling takes just a second and liked it for a while, but then I didn’t and turned it off again, not because it sounded poorly but because I just couldn’t agree with the volume being auto-adjusted, not even in album mode (which preserves volume differences within an album; somehow I liked Tidal’s slightly different version of leveling in the Tidal app more).

But the tweaks already suggested by the others can certainly improve certain things if you like playing around and don’t mind learning a bit about it. The Roon help pages are a good starting point, search for DSP.

Or you can go all the way, measure your room, and get filters constructed:

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Very similar system,just one hi-cap,linn lp-12 and speakers are dynaudio confidence20. You should be enjoying it. As far as technically savvy, I didn’t even know that I could do dsp with Roon.

I started thinking about it and read the FAQ about applying DSP as a room correction. You have to record the sound resonances in your room and create some form of file you upload into Roon to apply room correction. Roon call it Convolution amd REW is one of the recording softwares you can use. I took one look at it - it was very convoluted! My eyes glazed over and I’m waiting for someone to explain how to do it in plain English :flushed:

You can use the Parametric EQ which is much simpler. Useful if you have a touch of bass boom or your speakers are a bit bright in your listening room.

The HAF filter experience is the simplest way for novices (like myself) to apply Convolution (DSP).
If you are curious about it, have a read of the HAF threads on here or on the Roon forum, there are some really good descriptions and personal experiences highlighted.

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The inbuilt Roon filter DSP is good for headphone / ear optimisation… where personal differences can be more noticeable with high end equipment… also Roon contains the corrective filters from Audeze for their headphones.

Additionally Roon can provide good speaker room coupling eq similar to active speaker basic eq settings. This can be useful for adjusting the in room response.

Of course you can go for the full hog, and go for full room correction but that is more involved to setup and negatively affect SQ performance if not careful.

Be warned though, DSP functions are dependent on the digital integrity of the source. MQA files will not respond as well as PCM files due to the added digital artefacts in MQA that are not audible to many normally, but can become obtrusive after DSP… as it breaks the MQA encoding.

With Naim devices, I find the best results with Roon when you override the Naim player settings from 32 bits to 24 bits. This becomes apparent if you use Roon DSP.

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Interesting, I hadn’t considered issues issues using MQA with DSP - my Tidal account has now lapsed so not of concern to me anymore. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks, I took a look at the HAF thread and their web site. It was slightly less intimidating, but I don’t think I’m comfortable with messing around with it and maybe ending up with a counterproductive outcome……

I was also of a similar mindset Mike, not really knowing my way round these kind of things, but decided to have a go.
It’s a relatively simple case of taking 9 measurements around your listening position with miniDSP or similar, all captured into HAFs tool on your laptop or PC ,ie. no messing around with REW, and then sending them off to HAF.

They then come back with a few words and one or more filters, depending what you go for, which can be plugged into Roon DSP and you can switch them on or off very easily to check the effect and whether you like them.
If it doesn’t sound quite right, HAF will adjust the filter to your taste until you are satisfied.

For the relatively low cost involved (compared to say even something like a new cable) I thought it was worth a try even if it didn’t quite work out, but in the end I was very satisfied with the results.

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My only optimisations are for the NDS which I use a -3db in headroom which allows a better sound listening at low volume levels. For my headphones I have Sennheiser HD800 connected via an headline, powered with HiCap. The audio stream is provided by a Lindemann Bridge into the Naim NDac with XPS DR and with this the DSP is set up with convolution for the HD800, headroom at -3db and crossfeed enabled. Sounds good especially with my new Dekoni ear pads which are extra comfy.

Tim

I use Roon to tame boomy bass from Spendor 2/3 R2. I love the easy nature and the rich sound of the speakers, but with my room, they get bass wild. I use Parametric EQ and High pass filter to cut low frequencis. Lower tones get under controle with, to my ears, no substential sound quality loss. It is a life saviour :slight_smile: … Beside that, I get used to really good Roon interface, so I plan to go for a lifetime subscription. It will hurt my wallet once, but then I am done :slight_smile:

What parameters do you use on the high pass filter?

Quite aggressive, as I said, bass can get wild. I have a cut from 75 Hz downwards, usually at 12dB, but it depends on the music. This make a slow steady curve towards problematic 45Hz.

Thanks. Practical solution without getting too complicated!

Almost looks like an LS3/5a response curve :wink:

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I am not at all claiming to be an expert, but I have experimented a bit with REW and DSP settings in Roon. Just out of curiosity not solve a problem or so. Our rooms ‘sounds’ quite good it turned out. What I did: I bought a UMIK-1 microphone and installed REW on my Mac Mini that also runs Roon Server. Next step was to measure the performance of the room using REW by playing so called sweeps. This is where REW plays a sound starting at 10Hz up to 20.000Hz and at the same time it measures the sound through the microphone. What you get as a result, is a measurement of your room, where it enhances or reduces certain frequencies.

Now you can use REW to calculate so called convolution filters, which basically are smart equalizer filters to ‘flatten’ your frequency curve. You calculate these filters agains a flat curve, but you can also decide to alter the target curve before calculating the filters. For example because you like more bass, or less highs, or… Next step is to export these filters, import them into Roon and then apply them. See below in the signal path (although in Dutch, but you get the point I hope).

In my case I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the sound with the filters applied. Apparently it is quite an art to get these filters correct. So this is something to dive into when I have time.

BR,
Richard

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