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Now that everything is running smoothly, I am intrigued by some of the tweaks that can be done in Roon.
The one that interests me is the upsampling option. Is it worthwhile doing this in Roon or is it best just to leave all the digital processing to the Devialet? If it is worthwhile doing this in Roon, what would be typical Roon settings?
I have read some of the discussion on this where this has been mentioned, but some of it is a bit too technical and/or involves the use of other products. My set up, in contrast, is very basic - a 220 pro (with CI board installed and latest software) connected to Roon Core via Ethernet. My music collection is largely CD quality but I do now have quite a few hi-res files (24/96) and mostly classical music.
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I think the beauty of Roon is that it allows you to try these things yourself very easily, and let your ears decide. My collection is mostly CD quality, but when I buy new music, I usually opt for the Hi-res version if it is available. I have tried various permutations, but in the end I have come back to leaving things as they are, and letting the Devialet handle such things. Since the D is going to upsample internally anyway, it seems a little perverse to do it externally first. Also, whilst bandwidth isn't particularly a problem with a wired Ethernet connection, it seems logical to think that the less data we stuff down the pipe, the less chance there is of something getting mangled.
I have a number of DSD recordings, and I prefer the SQ of those (sent as DSD64) to listening to the PCM equivalent (assuming the masters were not different) , but I did not find the same magic came through if I converted PCM to DSD in Roon. Similarly, I can't reliably say I notice any difference if I go from 44.1 to 176, but that's just my ears, my system. They all sound good to me.
Try it, and let us know what you think.
NUC i5/ROCK/Roon Lifetime => Original d'Atelier CoreInfinity #066 => Transparent MusicWave+ =>Wilson Sophia 3
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26-Jun-2018, 10:41
(This post was last modified: 26-Jun-2018, 10:44 by Pim.)
Upsampling in Roon is easy to do and you can have a listen straight away and make up your mind. I tried sampling everything to DSD64 for a laugh and found it a bit too soft. Worth doing though. Only you can decide whether or not it's doing any good for your ears.
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Jim Smith's GBS.
Northern NSW Australia.
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Thank you for your responses! As suggested I tried out various configurations. For my test I used Beethoven Piano Sonatas played on a pianoforte and Nielsen symphonies My experiences correspond to both those of Pim and Zappydev. I tried the DSD and found that there seemed to be a softening and loss of detail (of course this may not be an issue with native DSD files - but I don't have any of these). Along with Zappydev, I didn't find any benefit of getting Roon to do the upsampling - they sounded the same to my ears.
One tweak that did seem to provide some sound quality benefit is the volume levelling - which I have set at the album level. This seems to provide just a little bit more "air" around the sound. I do not know why this might be the case - although I notice, that according to the Roon Signal Path information, Roon is doing some processing to achieve this.
I have to say, it is wonderful that my issues with Devialet are now around tweaking to get the best possible sound (from what is already excellent SQ) rather than just keeping the system playing music. The next challenge will be to see if I can improve on the speaker set up using Roon. (My dealer did the installation for me - and I think it is pretty good - but you never know!)
