Hi all,
I’m curious about the sq differences between room and upnp. For what it’s worth I have roonified my nd5 xs, not by adding a dac, but by using an LMS (Logitech media server) to upnp bridge. I enable LMS mode in the roon server and can play to the nd5 xs from the roon interface. Awesome! I expect that since the streamer still gets upnp delivered music the sq is preserved. The software lms-upnp bridge is opensource and on GitHub search for philippe44 lms-to-upnp. Interested to hear if anybody else has gone this route?
Yes, but with the Sonore UPnP Bridge, essentially the same concept, but packaged with the SonicorbiterOS, so less DIY
Used for about a year with an NDS to make this ‘Roon Ready’.
As you are feeding the NDS from the Ethernet port, with a UPnP protocol based flow, there is no format conversion to S/PDIF, as well as using the optimised path in Naim’s Classic Network players.
simon.pepper,
I use the Sonore UPnP bridge with my NDS too…works really well but do you think the quality is compromised in some way using this approach vs. a streamer that is designed to be inherently ‘Roon Ready’?
Scott.
I’m probably out of my depth talking about this stuff, so maybe best to take my input with a pinch of salt! Interesting to try and grapple with these things, though.
Scott, the answer is most likely yes in terms of sounding subtly different. What is relevant is the implementation of the transport streaming code. The Roon end point code on the streamer will be different from the UPnP media transfer code … we know different code execution here can make differences with SQ, WAV and FLAC is a good example of this… and much care is taken with Naim on code execution timing and efficiency to obtain maximum SQ performance.
So careful not to confuse identical media content necessarily sounding the same in all transfer modes… it doesn’t… I realise for some this might be hard to get ones head around
Another example is the difference, certainly noticeable on the first ten streamers, between playing Tidal natively, and playing Tidal via a media proxy server such as BubbleUPnP. The latter typically sounded better… so you may find actually the SQ is better using abridge (talking subtle here) compared to native Roon end point…
This all goes to underline the value and importance of the transport, and why the NDX2, ND555 and to a large extent the ND5XS2 is a major upgrade over the NDX or NDS in terms of transport.
You can push media to a streamer as well using the UPnP control functions… therefore a media proxy server can convert RAAT to a UPnP stream. The proxy server (what some call a ‘bridge’) would terminate the RAAT stream, and initiate a UPnP controlled media transfer to the streamer.
The BubbkeSoft UPnP proxy media server works in a similar way, and allows Qobuz and Tidal to be played and transcoded and presented to the streamer as if locally sourced media.
Very interesting as I’m using bubble upnp as a proxy media server…
Trying to run tidal natively on a raspberry pi to improve SQ but maybe there’s no need for it ?
I certainly found that Tidal from Roon to be better than Tidal from Naim’s implemenation, through the UPnP bridge to my NDS.
Plus with Roon you can play Tidal Masters with the MQA processing to a max of 24/96 in the Roon Core.
If the feeling/experience is that playback via UPnP is still better that the current RAAT implementation on the new streamers, it would be interesting to hear Roon through a ND555 alongside an NDS with the UPnP Bridge, playing from the same Roon Core & network.
As I know Roon decodes music files on Roon core, not Roon end point. The network content (RAAT) from Roon core to Roon end point in streamer is another format of PCM or DSD and control command.
Network content from UPnP server to UPnP renderer in streamer is basically music files and UPnP renderer needs to decode music files.
If you have RPi. (Linux) based network bridge you can easily monitor resource usage (CPU RAM Network Disk) of UPnP renderer app and Roon Bridge app. Actually Roon Bridge is very lightweight on resource usage.
But this does not mean Roon always has better SQ than UPnP.
For local media and Tidal you can use either… However I quite enjoy my local library and my virtual library being seamlessly linked and searchable, and Roon allows for that.
Roon also allows some bit manipulation to the audio should you wish such as speaker optimisation or room response filtering as well as MQA decoding upto 98kHz…
The sound differences i observe between the two for all things being equal are very minimal, and I have decided don’t really out weigh the advantages to me… so I tend to use Roon right now.
For me it was and has been the user interface. A more pleasant browsing and search experience, better content, ability to run the client on my Mac, and ability to use more than one client at a time Lyrics are nice too.
