Streaming clarification

[audio_engr]

Arup,

A question. Why are you having Roon convert everything to DSD64 when the Devialet converts DSD to PCM before doing its digital to analog conversion?

Roon have a page on their website where they talk about upscaling and the reasons for and against having Roon upscale. One of the reasons for not having Roon upscale is that your DAC does a very good job of upscaling which results in no benefit being gained from having Roon do the upscaling. I've tried having Roon upscale PCM to 192/24 for streaming to my 140 Pro vs having Roon stream the music at whatever the native resolution is and letting the 140 Pro upscale  and I don't hear a difference so I stream PCM at its native resolution and let the 140 Pro handle all upscaling.

I realise that converting PCM to DSD isn't simply upscaling but I can't see any advantage to converting PCM to DSD in Roon and streaming DSD to a Devialet where it is immediately going to be converted back to PCM before the Devialet can do anything with it. I'm not certain whether that conversion back to PCM is at 88.2 or 96 kHz or whether it's at 176.4 or 192 kHz, either way CD quality PCM is going to be upscaled by Roon before streaming to the Devialet but, as I said, I can't hear a benefit from having Roon upscale and I can't see a benefit in having Roon convert PCM to DSD when the first thing the Devialet is going to do is to convert DSD back to PCM.

Having said that, I do stream the DSD64 files I have on my Nucleus Pro to the 140 Pro as DSD and let the 140 Pro do the DSD to PCM conversion.

I'm not saying that what you're doing is wrong or sounds worse, I'm just wondering why you choose to stream in this way.

David

Hello David,

It's been a while since our last communication. 

I go DSD in Roon because I evaluated very critically [native PCM to Devialet] vs. [DSD64 to Devialet] and I found that with DSD, phasing was much more accurately rendered and it was most appreciable with classical orchestral music. The orchestra was precisely placed within the soundstage and the soundstage was also like real life, i.e. wide and deep with precise height. Further, DSD rendered superior low-midbass-mids better to my ears. 

Indeed, the BB 1792 dacs inside our Devialets will work as PCM thus the DSD files sent to Devialet ultimately becomes PCM and in fact ADDS more processing steps along the way than directly sending native PCM to Devialet and let Devialet upsample (if it wishes) but again ... to my ears, the DSD route sounded more correct. And since 2021, I've gone the DSD route.

Thanks for your detailed clarification that helps me to understand that our Nucleus is the streamer. By the way, Uptone Audio's etherREGEN is almost thro' with their GEN-2 which is promised to be waaaayyyy superior to what we use.   

Thanks again !!

- Arup