23-Jun-2018, 21:38
I run Roon AIR straight from my Antipodes server to the Devialet, no intermediary devices doing signal processing, and one thing I've found that echoes your findings to some degree is that settings do make a difference and reducing processing tasks or processor activity wherever possible always seems to produce a benefit. For example Roon offers me several signal path options in its audio settings menu and disabling every one of those options other than the one in use seems to produce a slight benefit. Likewise disabling volume control in Roon seems to produce a small benefit for me. Somewhere I have an option to disable the optical and coax outputs in the Antipodes and doing that results in a slight benefit. None of these benefits on their own is a big deal and if it comes to the choice of enabling or disabling a single setting there's little in it, I could easily run either way, but when i start to add slight benefits together the improvement seems to compound and become greater than what I'd expect from a simple summing of the benefits.
With the Devialet running a config with just the ethernet input enabled, the only input I'm using, seems to sound better than running factory config with all inputs enabled and selecting the ethernet input. I wonder if there's a slight reduction in processing in the Devialet when you disable unused inputs, and that makes me wonder if being able to disable the unused streaming inputs that show when you use the iOS remote app would also be beneficial but so far we have no way of doing that.
The gear we choose to put in our signal path is obviously important and we all make different choices about that but really digging into settings and disabling everything I can do without so that the gear in the chain is working as simply as possible to deliver the result I want seems to be just as important and while individual setting changes may seem insignificant or not worth bothering about, a number of those individual changes added together can become noticeably more significant.
Your experience with having HQ player upsample to 176.4 and then have the SOtM/Mutec upsample to 192 reminds me of my experience with video back when Blu-ray was first introduced. I had a 768i LCD TV and I had the choice of letting my Oppo player upscale SD output to 720p or 1080p and then letting the TV finish the scaling to 768i or having the player output 576i (Australia uses the PAL system) and letting the TV do the scaling to 768i. Having the player output 576i and letting the TV do the upscaling in a single step was definitely better than having the player do an initial upscale and then having the TV do a second scaling process. I'm not surprised that you find doing all of the upsampling in a single operation better than doing it in 2 steps in different places.
With the Devialet running a config with just the ethernet input enabled, the only input I'm using, seems to sound better than running factory config with all inputs enabled and selecting the ethernet input. I wonder if there's a slight reduction in processing in the Devialet when you disable unused inputs, and that makes me wonder if being able to disable the unused streaming inputs that show when you use the iOS remote app would also be beneficial but so far we have no way of doing that.
The gear we choose to put in our signal path is obviously important and we all make different choices about that but really digging into settings and disabling everything I can do without so that the gear in the chain is working as simply as possible to deliver the result I want seems to be just as important and while individual setting changes may seem insignificant or not worth bothering about, a number of those individual changes added together can become noticeably more significant.
Your experience with having HQ player upsample to 176.4 and then have the SOtM/Mutec upsample to 192 reminds me of my experience with video back when Blu-ray was first introduced. I had a 768i LCD TV and I had the choice of letting my Oppo player upscale SD output to 720p or 1080p and then letting the TV finish the scaling to 768i or having the player output 576i (Australia uses the PAL system) and letting the TV do the scaling to 768i. Having the player output 576i and letting the TV do the upscaling in a single step was definitely better than having the player do an initial upscale and then having the TV do a second scaling process. I'm not surprised that you find doing all of the upsampling in a single operation better than doing it in 2 steps in different places.
Roon Nucleus+, Devilalet Expert 140 Pro CI, Focal Sopra 2, PS Audio P12, Keces P8 LPS, Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with optical fibre link to my router, Shunyata Alpha NR and Sigma NR power cables, Shunyata Sigma ethernet cables, Shunyata Alpha V2 speaker cables, Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack, RealTRAPS acoustic treatment.
Brisbane, Qld, Australia
