Roon sound quality

Have you tried using it with HQPlayer?

Jan, I agree with you it's not as good sounding as Audirvana but haven't got a solution as yet.  It's prettier but it does have a habit of ignoring my carefully added metadata.

Audirvana sounds better, more open , crispy. roon sounds more "muddy" imho, mids are not that clear...Would really love to have roon on top of Audirvana ;-)

ralf

As Eloise said above, HQ Player is what you're looking for. 

SJB 

Roon has no sound of it's own. It's a bit-perfect delivery system to whatever DAC/Endpoint you use, so it's post-Roon processing that you're looking at really. There is quite a thread about HQPlayer on the Roon forum.

Thank you gents. I had incorrectly assumed that Roon was also playback software. 

HQPlayer installed.

I've set the 'SDM Pack' to none, 'Modulator' to ASDM 7 and phasers to stun. 'CUDA offload' sounds too ominous to try.

Initial findings: Audirvana still has the edge, with better detail and musical flow, along with that neat time-expanding effect that lets you get into the spaces between the notes. 

Which settings in HQPlayer have you found to offer the most engaging musical experience?

Jan

a lot depends on your DAC, it's well worth trying poly_sinc filters, anD upsampling to the highest res DSD your DAC can manage.

poly-sinc best for spatial cues, poly-sinc short for snappy drums. Play around.

With the Hugo TT it seems best to avoid DSD and upsample to 386 pmc. I'm using poly-sinc-short-mc.

SJB

To be honest I would be wary of DACs  with different 'filter' types or pre DAC filter methods. The optimisation required for a specific reconstruction filter is significant for top audio quality - and DACs with configurable filters have always sounded less than stellar in my opinion. Theoretically the reconstruction filter should match the construction filter at the recording encoding stage... this is effectively never achieved - so reconstruction is inevitably quite a relative compromise.

PCM bit stream reconstruction filters are sinc filters so as  to convert steps into emulating infinitely narrow points in time, and the digital low pass filters will typically be based on standard filter variants such as a Butterworth filter with varying number of poles to affect cut off rate or slope and  instability / unlinearity around the cut off point.

The implementation will be either FIR or IIR - this is the algorithm implementation method of the digital filter.. FIR uses taps or a sample filter response window that is multiplied across the sample stream in a moving window fashion- and a better performance is achieved with a greater number of taps.. or a larger filter response window. An IIR filter is recursive and theoretically provides the best performance as it effectively continuous or infinite - but the processing power required tends to introduce noise and other artefacts ... which can ultimately limit its effectiveness. However the optimisation of either requires much careful design  for optimum performance.

I believe Naim use IIR responses and the Chord Hugo uses FIR for example.

Simon, I have no idea what any of that meant, but I can say that imho my Hugo sounds better, and more analogue, without any upsampling or filters switched on in Audirvana.   

Exactly