ROON Playing DSD Files

[artto]

I've tried playing some of my DSD/DSF files using the ROON player.

 

I don't like what I'm hearing. And the "quality indicator" light is a small yellow dot. The Signal Path shows a lot of conversions, down-sampling and floating point conversion. My Endpoint is limited to 24/192.

 

Is there any way to improve this? It seems like the lower quality signal path indicator and my ears agree. Is there any way for ROON to produce the highest quality at the Endpoint (amp/DAC) from a DSD file?

[Thaddeus Smith]

Get a DAC that supports native DSD. I use a topping D10 as a pretty low cost barrier to entry for this exact scenario.

[bobdog]

With DSD files from Roon I can honestly not tell a difference between my DAC that supports DSD and those that only do PCM with Roon converting.  They all sound Wonderfull.  Im wondering if a setting is wrong for you.  My quality light shows purple with  the DSD capable DACs and Green with the ones that are not.  Ive never seen a yellow dot.I would check settings.  I also wonder if something in your signal chain is not compatible with what Roon wants to send it.

[rplace]

 

 

Can you post a screen shot of your signal path? How many dots do you have? What are you using between Roon and DAC, not that it matters but curious. Lot's of people swear that Roon Advanced Audio Transport (RAAT) sounds best. I've never had anything except RAAT on my "real" system so can't weigh in on how the bridge/streamer might impact things if it is not RAAT. All my non-RAAT stuff is spread out the house in non-critical areas. That said nothing in my other 5-6 locations actually sounds bad.

 

On 4/3/2022 at 5:08 PM, artto said:

I don't like what I'm hearing

What are you hearing that you don't like?

 

Agree with @Thaddeus Smith if you don't want conversions you need a DAC that supports your chosen format natively. I've got a Denafrips Venus II, Gaia and Terminator + I'm "thinking" about selling. I have to get rid of one, just not sure which. PM me if you are interested in some back and forth dialogue. 

 

This is what one of my DSD/DSF files looks like. 3 dots is the least you can have....I believe.

 

[Thaddeus Smith]

Same..

 

It's possible your pc's compute resources are insufficient for the DSD to PCM conversion and you're getting artifacts as a result. Need more details about the signal chain, and a screen shot of ROON similar to what we've posted above. I'd be interested to see a screen shot of your task manager (performance tab) while playback is happening as well.

 

 

[artto]

Yeah, I suspect there's several issues.

 

First of all, I'm not using a traditional, separate "DAC". My endpoint is NAD M32. NAD recently released a new MDC USB module that supports DSD directly. I may have to install that to get better results.

 

Right now, the same DSD recording sounds better when played from the DSF file burned to CD-R and played on my Sony SACD player.

 

To me, it seems like there's too many "conversions" in the signal path. And as Thaddeus mentioned, I don't think my laptop is up to the task. It's a Pentium machine. I've used it for 24/96 multi-track recording. It's been optimized and tested for that. But later, when I experimented with various DSP plug-ins, such as Izotope Ozone on playback with J River, eventually I stopped using it for the same reason. The DSP "effects", while doing what they were supposed to, also seemed to have a negative effect on overall playback quality. My conclusion was that the CPU couldn't keep up with the processing load.

 

I'll post the signal path when I get a chance.

 

Regardless, I think I see an Intel NUC i7 on the horizon.

[rplace]

2 hours ago, artto said:

Regardless, I think I see an Intel NUC i7 on the horizon

Absolutely if you are doing DSP. I've run Roon on a laptop and NAS. Since moving to an i7 NUC and Rock things have been very trouble free.