The Positive Side of Roon

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Roon is up & running. I must admit the Roon player seems to sound better than the BluOS app/player, or J River. With the BluOS app I’m streaming (Ethernet) directly into the BluOS module in the NAD M32. With J River I use my laptop with HDMI connection to the M32.

 

I originally became interested in Roon because I’ve some posts about using Roon for parametric EQ. This interested me because since I built a sound barrier wall to appease my neighbor from excessive bass, the wall is now reflecting that bass energy back into the room. There are some known room mode issues around 50-60Hz and a similar problem because of the distance between my house and my neighbor. I’ve been working on solving this acoustically. It is a work in progress. Software EQ is the easy way out, at least for now.

 

But here’s the strange part. When using Roon I’m not feeling the need to attenuate bass response. I’ll often use the bass tone control to (usually) cut the bass a few dB on many modern recordings. With Roon I’m not feeling the need to do this. I wonder why? Even when I use Roon to stream from Tidal the low end sounds more in balance. So the irony is, when using Roon I don’t feel the need for any EQ, even though that’s why I wanted to try it in the first place.

 

The other thing, I mention in my ma”Roon”ed post is the sound when playing loud. I mentioned Roon seemed to take a slight “edge” off the sound (in a positive way – sort of McIntosh-like)

 

I thought these players are supposed to be “bit perfect”. But there’s obviously something else going on.

 

Has anyone experienced anything similar, or care to speculate/expand on this?

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Roon can be bit perfect if you configure it that way.  Your signal path will tell you what it is doing to the bits.