Perhaps we hear things differently. Iāve also spoken to a few people that found the did not like it but there is a lot of pressure to āfall in lineā - meaning go with what most people have as the view.
Iām happy for Roon to exist and do what it does in its own right - but the idea that it improves SQ was something that does not stack-up with the results at the level of ND555 - Statement. Perhaps the character it imposes is not noticeable in other systems and then its user-interface advantages will win-out.
Hopefully on a thread asking if to Roon or not a contrary view is OK.
Just on how it works I was suspicious it could improve things and suspected it mat get away with not worsening things - and then Iād be interested in the user interface, so was expecting a possible mildly negative to neutral result and hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
But my sheer disappointment comes from absorbing all the glowing approvals of it and hearing music taken dramatically backward - it would make my upgrade from 552 to S1Pre pointless from what I heard. The lack of neutrality and strong signature and the sounding that all the Artist are pulled into a lump and smeared-together - and a lot of other things is too much for me to be neutral about.
If there are a specific set of recommended settings for use with ND555 then someone post them here and Iāll ensure my Dealer has them set for my next demo. Iāve got to hear it deliver and not just all the what now seem hype to me.
The Dealer had it on Roonās own box I think. Iāll check with them tomorrow, but Iām sure they tried to do the best they could as they have all their kit and do sell it and have customers that like it - just not this one.
Without putting words into their mouth I was given the strong impression by them that at ND555 level Roon was just not a very transparent way to run the system - but they obliged me with a demo when I asked to hear it.
They should bring this up with Roon as they will want to know if something is not right as they donāt want a product that sounds bad. It may be they are not that up on it, itās easy to add the airplay or ChromeCast endpoint to the new streamers and not the RAAT one. Either way feedback should be given to Roon. I know the RAAT sdk is not the latest on Naim kit but that should not effect sq as they are all backwards compatible.
The product should be good enough to sell itself in a good demo if intended for this price point of system capability - but it just did not deliver - for me.
I want to be clear here. I never thought that Roon improved SQ, and neither did it disimprove it. It is essentially neutral in my experience. What it does do is transform access to your library, and itās maintenance.
Exactly - from a SQ perspective it should be neutral (noting a straight signal path, no DSP etc). No point in having it if this isnāt the case, no matter how good the UI is. The only difference in SQ i found was between running the Core on a Macbook to moving to a Nucleus - something i put down to moving to a wired version. One thing to note is the ND555 has been reported as sounding ābetterā with all inputs enabled and IIRC Naim have noted this as a bug. I do wonder if something is amiss with Roon on this player given the big discrepancy in SQ that DB found between Roon and UPnP.
DB, I recall you have also compared media servers and found Twonky better than minimserver both run via the Melco - an unexpected finding for most of us here.
One interpretation of your findings is that what makes the difference is the Melco direct Ethernet output, the Melco having been āvoice-optimizedā with Twonky.
Unfortunately Melco is not a roon end point, that would allow for a more apples to apples comparison. This sounds to me more a Melco āplusā rather than a Roon āminusā.
For me any SQ difference with UPnP was negated by over riding the Naim endput registration settings to 24 bit as opposed to 32 bitā¦ this is more a Naim thing rather than Roon.
Underneath the covers the media transfer methods then looked consistent between UPnP and Roon RAAT.
Of course there is more option to modify the sound with Roon Core than with most UPnP media servers, and that can affect things, but easy to not use those bit modification functions.
Also there is the inter frame timing variances that occurs between any media server whether it be Roon or UPnPā¦ and this down to more the media server hardware and OSā¦ as well as potentially network setup. However I have found with a next generation streamer using an external DAC it is far less sensitive to this compared to the legacy streamers, no doubt due to the improved network stack processing decoupling in the new streamers which was, so I understand, a Naim design aim.
In short I have found, all things being equal, no meaningful sound difference between UPnP media server with LPCM and Roon Coreā¦ although there is often a subtle shift between different servers streaming the same media (irrespective of UPnP or Core) , I canāt say one clearly sounds better than the other with the new streamers. and I have tried two different Cores and three UPnP media servers.
The bottom line is I donāt use UPnP any more, and I am enjoying probably more music recordngs now than I ever did ā¦ and to me that says a lotā¦
My thoughts behind my original post were that, for roon to work it requires additional hardware and processing which sit on the network. My interest is primarily when accessing Tidal only not with accessing other local storage media. So if I listen to Tidal through my streamer natively there is less āhandlingā of the data stream than if I have the roon software and the hardware it runs on handling this data too.
My expectation was that roon will offer an enhanced user interface experience, but that this might be at the expense of sound quality, perhaps because of the additional data handling or simply because of the extra traffic and noise on the network generated by the roon infrastructure.
During my all to brief experiment with a dcs network bridge and a mac book pro connected to my modest system I did not notice any change between Tidal direct via the SU and Tidal through roon. With my technical head on I could envision why there might be a loss. Perhaps it is possible that the additional processing could cause compatibility issues with some kit more than others?
I find this fascinating.
You have a great system that I imagine is carefully tuned and set up.
And Roon makes no difference to SQ for you.
SiS says this about Roon: āitās a shame the usability of Roon is let down by the impact of SQ on higher end Naim equipmentā¦ so now I am tending to use Roon like Tidal for discovery, and itās really great for that via its applicationā¦ for immersive listening however,ā¦ ABSOLUTELY UPnP ā¦ā
Chrissu hears a quite small improvement in SQ in some cases with Roon, IIRC??
James N. on the other hand hears a significant uplift in SQ from Roon - even more so, IIRC, when he got a Roon Core.
And many others say Roon sounds better.
How can we explain the huge range of SQ impact of Roon (from worse to nothing to much better) in high end well set up systems when a direct comparison is made of the same recording with and without Roon?
As far as my system is concerned, the non-Naim part of it was conscientiously taken care of. I have some network and system administration knowledge and I believe the chain between my FLAC files and the ND555 is correctly optimized. Considering that RAAT is built on top of UPnP I see few reasons that would lead to a sound S.Q difference.
The most likely scenario explaining those differences is probably hardware or/and configuration related.
But, as we donāt know ChrisSu and others system details, we cannot discuss the possible differences which would explain the S.Q. differences.
Yes I did say that, until I discovered the 24/32 bit media Naim issue which I have described since on this forum. With 24 bit I hear no meaningful difference quality of sound between UPnP and Roonā¦ to the point all my listening including immersive sessions are via Roon nowā¦ I donāt really use UPnP at all.
As I have recently stated I consider UPnP and Roon RAAT, all things being equal, have equivalent sound qualityā¦ and indeed underneath the covers the media appears consistent and both now use TCP.
Sound shifts can occur for various reasons, that are not specific to whether Roon or UPnPā¦ such as inter frame timing differences - especially on the legacy streamers - between different physical media servers, and media server instances.
I think I mentioned that my own experience was based only on using Roon (on a MacBook) with my Atom, which is so much less revealing than the high end systems being discussed here that I am reluctant to make any strong assertions. Any difference I did hear was very slight, and perhaps slightly in favour of UPnP over Roon.
On my NDX, Roon certainly doesnāt sound as good as UPnP, but thatās using a Chromecast Audio via Toslink, so not a level playing field.
I think so. It seems to be the Naim registration details that Naim responds back to the Roon Core with. This would only affect Naim devices that natively support Roon.
Iāve communicated all these details to my Dealer for my next demo (possibly next week) to ensure nothing is done wrong.
Iāll also admit that my disappointment against the glowing reports about Roon probably sharpened my initial feelings about the results I heard. Anything I say in future will be just to the facts and hopefully of a more positive experience.
I want that as anything that further improves my music experience without audibly impairing the result Iād love to be available for people like me.
But at present I manage to evoke what I want with the Naim App which for its few foibles generally does what I want as far as UPnP, which is my reference - as Iāve not yet had a great experience of downloads and HiDef but hopefully that will change too.
The other music sources are great to have but the highest music experience I get in terms of rendered music quality is from pre-2000 rips of CDs, some carefully-selected by trial-and-error to get the good masters.
To me I have the strong impression and experience (with occasional exceptions) the mastering process gradually since 2000 is worse and blandly-done at best (more usually awful) and then all the fuss is on the format as sold to customer, as this is the ānumberā that is paid for and drives the process. Customer sees āRemasterā and āHi-Defā and presumes ābetterā but in fact not usually so in my experience of the music genres I like to listen too.
In any case I intended to poke people to check it does what they want for themselves as I think there is not a settled consensus with Roon - some (many) love it and some did not have that initial experience with it go that well. If it was just the User Interface then it has little competitionā¦but there is this pesky SQ thing for me to get done right too.
I have just spent half an hour listening to āAutomobile Noiseā from a CD rip of The Blue Nileās āA walk across the rooftopsā on the Melco N10, connected directly to ND555. I switched alternately between Roon and the Naim app using Minimserver. I did not detect any significant difference in SQ between the two approaches.
I had done the experiment multiple times in my system. Playing the same WAV file residing in my NAS via Roon vs UPnP I hear difference on dynamic. Via UPnP is more dynamic. Measuring with a SPL meter the dynamic rage is about 2db wider than via Roon.
I also have JRiver installed in my PC. If I do the file analysis with JRiver vs Roon. The JRiver dynamic range number is always bigger than Roon analysis.
So, for music I love, I buy the high resolution files for listening via UPnP. It is better. Though I do much of listening via Qobuz/Roon that is good enough since I donāt plan to buy a lot of music.
Well then you are not comparing like with likeā¦and you will be processing the audio someway. Perhaps show your Roon sample processing/authentication chain. If there is no processing them samples are identical, as they donāt care whether they are being controlled by Roon Core or Upnp media server.
Yes Roon Core has some special features that you can enable to reduce SPL, but I donāt touch thoseā¦ a bit like the max loudness control on an iPhone.
I have some tools, thanks to REW, that show on playback, with all things being equal on a real system they are effectively identical.
