Devialet, Roon and Tidal

[petrik]

Pushed by this thread, i did a small test trying to simplify the chain in my system:

  — Listening Tidal content just from the iPad using Airplay, no computer, no Roon, nothing more.

And the impression wasn´t so bad... until to come back to AIR/Roon like i normaly use.
The difference is big. From where comes the difference in quality, I do not know, AIR? Roon? Maybe both.
I´m not a computer audio expert too, i need to search and find really audible improvements.
Waiting for the next step/test.

I have noticed the same, AIR just sounds better.

Airplay has not been designed to deliver perfect SQ. One significant problem is that there are two clocks involved when using Airplay. Brian from Roonlabs explains this nicely:

With AirPlay and systems like it, there are two clocks. One running on the computer, which decides how quickly to send buffers out over the network, and another running near the DAC, which actually drives the digital-analog-conversion process.

So lets say, the DAC's clock is running at a perfect 44100.000. The computer's clock might be at 44100.005. This seems like a small difference, but over even relatively short periods of time, they will drift relative to each other. In this case, since the computer is faster, data will tend to "pile up" in the AirPlay device.

Obviously, AirPlay devices don't have unlimited RAM to let the data pile up (nor do they have time-travel chips to address the case where the computer is sending buffers too slowly). So they have to somehow resolve this mismatch in the rate of data flowing in and out.

• Measure the clock discrepancy and use that information to instruct the clock next to the DAC to speed up or slow down to match the rate that data is arriving--best approach, but expensive to implement. This degrades the signal because there is distortion when the clock speeds up/slows down, and because the clock is no longer running at exactly its intended rate.
  
• "Stuff" or "Drop" samples from the audio stream in the digital domain. This can be done well or poorly, but clearly degrades the signal during corrections since sample data is being dropped or synthesized.
  
• Perform an asynchronous sample rate conversion from, in our example, 44100.005hz to 44100hz. This degrades the signal the whole time that the conversion is running to a degree that depends on the quality of the sample rate conversion algorithm.
  

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/raat-an...hip/6915/2