I find auto volume levelling on louder songs sound compressed.
My point was that Roon does exactly what Philipp above described, upsampling before DSP, because there is nothing else you can do.
As to volume leveling, there are many ways to do it and the LUFS method as used by Roon or also Tidal has nothing to do with compression whatsoever. Nevertheless, I also do not like it much when track leveling makes a quiet song play as loud as a loud song in a track list, it just feels wrong. It can be beneficial in some settings though when you want an even volume, like maybe background music at a home party, or in a cafƩ, or whatever - all markets for Roon. Same reason for why it is used on radio or TV. There is no requirement to turn it on for serious listening. Album-level it is fine though as it does not change the loudness relationship between the songs of an album
Edit: And if you are specifically referring to the āautoā setting in Roon - this uses album-leveling when listening to an album and track-leveling when in a playlist from different albums, and I donāt like the latter either, it can āsound compressedā, but be aware that it is not.
sorry for thread drift
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If ādigital EQ optionā is such an important feature why did you not select the Linn Selekt, Lyngdorf TDAI-3400 as your product of choice for a streamer?
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Simple : because youāre a nobody without a naim
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Or does it make you a naimless person then?
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Please see just a few comments above. Itās a little bit boring to answer the same question twice. You should read the comments more attentive before askingā¦
Woa dude!!! You know this is a friendly forum of owners and not Naim representatives?
Edit: not that taking like this to Naim folk is any better.
Yes, everyone should read through the whole thread before putting a question to another member since it might make them bored.
I donāt believe that ever happens to oftenā¦
Thereās probably like like two people who want digital EQ. The same number of people who want tone controls on their preamp. Itās not popular right now. Hasnāt been popular for decades. I certainly donāt have any interest in it.
Instead of taking away development resources on new features they should focus on making higher quality software.
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Yeah, youāre right. Iām sorryā¦ Itās 5 comments above yours. Hard to bring into context.
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I think thatās not true.
There are some serious manufacturers out there who put more and more effort into digital EQ, good hardware tone controls or Room Compensation. They do refine their existing technologies with each new model, do introduce it as a new feature in a new device or even bring it to their latest devices via firmware update. My feelings are this gets bigger and more important year by year. Just take a look at Dan DāAgostino Momentum, all the Linn DSMs, NAD, Roon, Steinway Lyndorf, Lyngdorf, Bang & Olufsen and much moreā¦
Not everyone is a hifi purist, wants to play with different speaker cables, power supplies, etc., has a seperate listening room or wants to tranform his living room into a HiFi shrine for the perfect individual sound signature. These people would benefit a lot, and all the others: just donāt use it if you do not want to use it. Donāt get me wrong, I like - I love - my Nova and the Naim Sound. Overall it was and it is still the perfect fit for me. But I know people who did not buy into Naim because of missing some settings to adjust the sound signature to their taste.
But who am Iā¦ Just sayingā¦
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Are we there yet?
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Not quite. Currently in Beta testing.
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Iāve requested access to the Beta programme, but pending that, Iāll summarise some of my findings here.
For about a month and half now, I own a Naim Uniti Star, firmware version 3.5.1.4972 (latest stable version at the time of writing). Iāve experienced many hangs, crashes and reboots. That I have so many may be related to the fact that Iām ripping CDās a lot (more than 100 per week), but thatās just conjecture on my part. Anyway, on to some of my observations. All of which to me indicate software (firmware) problems; based on my experience in the field I would guess some kind of resource leak or concurrency problem.
Note: the on-screen messages I āquoteā involve a bit of hand-waving, as my Star is set to Dutch, and some messages disappear from the display too quickly for me to run up to it and read them properly.
The Star may spontaneously reboot for no apparent reason. Iāve yet to find a reproducible set of circumstances, though. Mostly itāll reboot while Iām ripping, but that may be because Iām ripping a large part of the time Iām using the Star (busy ripping my entire CD collection). It may restart completely (blank screen, clicking power supplies, full reboot), or it may just reboot some subsystem. Example of the latter is that I was streaming a Tidal track while ripping a CD. It rebooted a subsystem (a click [from a power supply?]) could be heard, but the track continued playing. I got a āWelcome. Looking for paired remotes.ā message, after which it spat out the CD is was ripping, followed by a āFailed to rip CD due to an unknown error. Error 518ā.
The scary part after that, and other crashes Iāve experienced, was that I then could no longer switch the Star off! Neither through the remote, nor through the front-panel buttons. In some cases I was still able to connect to it through the Naim app, and switch it to stand-by through the Settings menu. And when in stand-by, I was sometimes able to long-press (a second or 3) the front-panel power button to switch it off (i.e. ārealā power-off, not stand-by, although still connected to the mains, and the front-panel power button is still lit, so letās call it ācoldā stand-by as opposed to the āwarmā stand-by after a āsoftā power-off). After which I could switch it back on using the front-panel power button (not through the remote, obviously, because it was now in ācoldā stand-by), but after it booted up (yada yada yada, plenty of time to admire the Naim logo on the display), I still could not switch it off using either the remote or the front-panel power button. Yikes. The only thing that could get it back into a usable state was unplugging it. Something that canāt be good for the machine (and possibly also not for my speakers, as unplugging it while āliveā gives a quite audible āBOOMPrrrrā on them). And in my set-up, itās also not easy, as the wall socket the Naim is plugged into is for all practical means and purposes unreachable (behind a cabinet), and the connector into the power input of the Star takes quite some force to pull out. [Which, to me, in itself is a good thing, as it makes for a tight connection, but it also makes me hesitant to unplug & plug back in too many times, for fear of wearing things out.]
But Iāve also had it reboot after I was playing an album through Tidal, paused the playback and put the Star on stand-by, came back after some time, switched the Star on and resumed playing. It played the first few seconds of the track, then went silent, then managed to show the cover image on the display, and only then rebooted.
Another problem Iāve experienced was while ripping a stack of CDās, it would fail to rip a new CD that I put in, spitting it out with the message āCD contains no tracksā. After that, it would refuse to rip any CD, including ones that I had successfully ripped just minutes before. The only way to get it out of that state was to do a power-off (long press of the front-panel power button; which by the way I only found out was possible through a post somewhere on this forum; do people no longer write proper user manuals these days I wonder?). After booting up, I could successfully rip the CD it had spat out before.
Another annoying thing is that some of the ripped tracks have āhiccupsā (I would call them FLAC encoding errors, but the FLAC files themselves are OK). In one case the Star would (consistently, reproducibly) play until the āhiccup pointā in the track (which wasnāt even halfway in the track itself), then skip to the next track. Playing that same track with e.g. VLC had an audible hiccup but continued playing the rest of the track. And none of these were tracks from CDās with ripping errors. After re-ripping these CDās, the hiccups were gone. I realised too late I probably should have saved these FLAC files. So when this morning I had another one, I did save it. This is the audio spectrum at the āhiccupā point:
As you can see, just before the 2:06 point in the track, thereās complete silence. An analysis with flac -a around that point gives me (sorry, nerd alert 
):
frame=0 offset=402 bits=136008496 blocksize=909 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=1 residual_type=RICE partition_order=0
warmup[0]=-2303
parameter[0]=10
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=2 residual_type=RICE partition_order=0
warmup[0]=-3994
warmup[1]=-3762
parameter[0]=10
frame=1 offset=17001464 bits=28576 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=1 residual_type=RICE partition_order=0
warmup[0]=2912
parameter[0]=10
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=1 residual_type=RICE partition_order=0
warmup[0]=-758
parameter[0]=10
frame=2 offset=17005036 bits=5464 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=1 residual_type=RICE partition_order=3
warmup[0]=-2172
parameter[0]=9
parameter[1]=0
parameter[2]=0
parameter[3]=0
parameter[4]=0
parameter[5]=0
parameter[6]=0
parameter[7]=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=2 residual_type=RICE partition_order=3
warmup[0]=197
warmup[1]=860
parameter[0]=9
parameter[1]=0
parameter[2]=0
parameter[3]=0
parameter[4]=0
parameter[5]=0
parameter[6]=0
parameter[7]=0
frame=3 offset=17005719 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=4 offset=17005735 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=5 offset=17005751 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=6 offset=17005767 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=7 offset=17005783 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=8 offset=17005799 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=9 offset=17005815 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=10 offset=17005831 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=11 offset=17005847 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=12 offset=17005863 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=13 offset=17005879 bits=128 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=CONSTANT value=0
frame=14 offset=17005895 bits=18696 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=2 residual_type=RICE partition_order=3
warmup[0]=0
warmup[1]=0
parameter[0]=0
parameter[1]=0
parameter[2]=8
parameter[3]=9
parameter[4]=9
parameter[5]=9
parameter[6]=9
parameter[7]=8
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=2 residual_type=RICE partition_order=3
warmup[0]=0
warmup[1]=0
parameter[0]=0
parameter[1]=0
parameter[2]=7
parameter[3]=8
parameter[4]=8
parameter[5]=8
parameter[6]=8
parameter[7]=8
frame=15 offset=17008232 bits=24744 blocksize=1152 sample_rate=44100 channels=2 channel_assignment=INDEPENDENT
subframe=0 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=2 residual_type=RICE partition_order=1
warmup[0]=-1758
warmup[1]=-1846
parameter[0]=8
parameter[1]=9
subframe=1 wasted_bits=0 type=FIXED order=2 residual_type=RICE partition_order=3
warmup[0]=-570
warmup[1]=-734
parameter[0]=8
parameter[1]=8
parameter[2]=8
parameter[3]=8
parameter[4]=8
parameter[5]=10
parameter[6]=9
parameter[7]=9
As you can see, frame 1 is OK, frame 2 is the start of the encoding error, frames 3 through 13 are completely silent (type=CONSTANT value=0), frame 14 is ramping up, and from frame 15 itās OK again.
Since the Beta forum is not open to the public (unfortunately) I have no idea whether any of these problems a. have been reported previously and b. are being addressed by the current beta firmware.
Oh, and before anyone asks, yes, I did try a factory reset. Thatās no joy, as that loses not just all your settings, but also all of your favourites and radio stations (and rebuilds the media library, which takes quite long if you have a lot of music). So thatās a hoop I hope I donāt have to jump through again. 
To end on a high note, when it works, the Star sounds absolutely magnificent. My hopes are on the software team delivering a version that fixes most (if not all) of these.
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If you havenāt already done so, it would probably be a good idea to send this info to Naim tech support for them to review and advise.
Surely tech support can read my forum post? Anyway, I forwarded a link to my post to Naim support.
It doesnāt quite work like that (and would be very hard to properly manage if it did), but thank you for forwarding your post to tech support.
I have also experienced the one second gaps of silence on a few CDs I have ripped on my Star as well. I was thinking it was fixed but as my collection is ripped I only rip a new CD every now and again these days.
Well, as we speak Iām rsyncāing my entire music library to my computer for off-line analysis. Will post here when thatās done.
Shot in the dark here. When I got my Star just over a year ago it was plagued by freezes and such. I also have a reasonable amount of local files and sub to Tidal and Qobuz.
It a point a few months ago I gave Roon a try. Aside from nicely consolidating the three sources into one smart library it also seemed to increase the stability of my Star. During this time the firmware also improved so I canāt say how much was because of what exactly.
But since that time I have had a pretty much restart free experience while effortlessly navigating music from various sources. Allowing me to concentrate on the beautiful sound of the Star, as you mention.
As you are obviously very tech savvy I thought Iād mention it. Roon can be tried for free. There, Iāll just leave this here 