Roon 1.3 is now live

Short of MQA decoding, this release has some incredible features. Updating now.

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-1-3-is-live/19239

 

Nice update. Some nice DSP stuff, convenient back-up ability and probably most important (to me), a more convenient way to search on Composer and works. Roon was pretty bad on the Classical side. Not perfect but much better now. Good job Roon. For those folks eagerly waiting MQA decoding, looks like you will need to wait a little longer. Not in the latest update. Oh, having the ability to display dynamic range value is welcome also.

 

Not sure I like the new style with alternating line colors between songs.

The DSP features are welcome, though! Can't wait to try the up-sampling with the Metrum Musette.

Edit: Audio Setup keeps crashing...

 

Seems like ROON will finally be able to import liner notes in PDF. If this is the case and it turns out to work well that might be what pushes me towards a lifetime subscription.
I've been scanning liner notes for a long time but with no good way of viewing them during playback it has always felt a bit cumbersome.

 

In the playlists.

 

http://kb.roonlabs.com/Gallery
Regarding pdfs !

 

Very chuffed to finally be able to use native parametric EQ and convolution in Roon and ditch HQPlayer. The latter has been less than reliable for me, frequent disconnects and it throws a wobbly if you power cycle your dac. Just waiting for ROCK now... will rebuild my Roon Core server once it's available. It's self-managing once built so that's one less pc for me to manage.

The quality of Roon updates is super impressive. They've got some excellent devs working for them for sure.

 

Agreed.
I've had some really nice results with Sonarworks and JRiver, especially using the Mono Monitoring function with HD800 and those hard panned jazz recordings from the fifties and sixties.
My previous experience with crossfeed has been somewhat mixed but Sonarworks really did a good job with this one.
That said I hope that I can get crossfeed to work with Roon 1.3 in a satisfying way.
The album liner function is FANTASTIC! For images it opens up within the software and for PDF's it opens up external software, which is fine by me.

EDIT: Sigh. Can't get the crossfeed to come anywhere near the "Mono Monitoring" function running in Sonarworks -> JRiver.
This has been one of the biggest improvements to my "daily listening experience" as most of my music was recorded in hard panned stereo...
As Roon doesn't work with VST's, I'm stuck.

EDIT2: Does Dirac Live have a mono function like Sonarworks? I ask because Dirac works with Roon, and is setup as a playback zone if I understand correctly. I could potentially configure Dirac to a similar mono monitoring output and by doing so still be able to benefit from the new pdf/image function in Roon.

EDIT3: Forget about Dirac. I saw the price

 

Has anyone tried upsampling Tidal 44.1 --> 176.4 in the new Roon? Sure as shit doesn't work for me, while Audirvana+ on the same computer handles it like a breeze.

 

I have. It works.

The Rednet is telling Roon it only supports one sampling rate (I never updated the controller to have the FR follow-up feature).

In Roon's DSP settings, only "For Compatibility Only" is available in the Sample rate Conversion options ("Max PCM rate" and "Custom" are not), but it does what it's meant to do: resample to whatever I set the Rednet to.

I very much dislike the sound of the "Minimum Phase" that I tried with the Musette yesterday. While it seems to bring out some details, transients sound like diarrhea...
I couldn't change the DSP settings from my phone, so I'll check later how Linear Phase fares...

 

Yeah, I'd want to use "Max PCM Power Of 2" since Lynx E22 will auto detect and switch to the incoming sample rate. But even if I rate lock the Lynx to 176.4 and then use "For Compatibility Only" I get garbage.

I've always used Linear Phase in Audirvana. No complaints.

 

The 1.3 update broke the Audio Setup (fixed now) and HQPlayer integration (also now fixed with 194) on my OS X machine. Quick listen to Roon upsampling vs HQPlayer to DSD showed I far favor HQP. I think it was on minimum phase, though, thanks for the idea @Clemmaster I'll try LP.

The dynamic range feature could be intriguing, although it seems to only work for local--I use roon mostly for Tidal (not sure why, I guess I am used to dealing with my library in HQP), I'd love to see it there although they may not be able to pull that off.

My favorite feature of Roon so far (not 1.3 based) is finding other performances of pieces I like. I love being able to see all the performances of a particular piece in my library, and against Tidal. I've lost myself for days doing that...

I'm looking forward to playing with the DSP.

Lots of features in this release. Pretty neat.

 

It seems I can achieve a mono mix down with the Procedural EQ feature in 1.3. Check out the link in the bottom of this post.

Just did a quick test and it seems to work quite well. Will compare with Sonarworks mono monitoring tomorrow.

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/can-you-set-roon-to-playback-in-mono/17507/11

 

So, turns out Lynx "advertises" 32-bit / 192 kHz, and although Audirvana says it's streaming 32-bit samples, I don't think it really is. Something must be getting truncated, which could explain the SQ difference mentioned next... In Roon, I need to force 24-bit samples and then 4x upsampling is smooth as pie.

Now, the Roon sound vs the Audirvana (iZotope) sound is quite different. I think I'm a Roon convert based on SQ alone. Feature set is impressive and Roon Remote is awfully nice (Android support). Will see... gonna milk this free trial period.

 

I'm sure I've read somewhere that the Lynx asio driver requires a 32-bit highway to be open regardless of file resolution.
Not sure if this explains anything...
When using JRiver you can see in the audio path what the Lynx cards get as input based on what they (hardware) request, which should be 32bit.
I'm wondering what Roon is doing...

I remember that thread with Bob Katz on the Interact forum re dithering/truncation;

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=76912.0

 

I can't seem to get the ASIO driver to work with Lynx AES16 in Roon. Haven't changed anything but going from JRiver to Roon. WASAPI works well.
Roon locks sample rate with DAC but I get no sound. Lots of dropouts across all outputs in the Lynx mixer.

 

On Mac, Roon also shows the "signal path", and it's that final dithering step which needs to be forced down to 24 bit (Incidentally, I think factor of 2 upsampling might be better, but here I was going all the way to 192):



Which is controlled by this setting:



But again, switching to Audirvana, when upsampling, it displays the stream out as 32/192, and audio is fine. So not really sure what's happening under the hood.

 

You're right, I've got the ASIO working with Roon and while I don't use upsampling I have that same output shown in the signal path.
Why isn't Roon outputting what Lynx is requesting? Maybe this is a question for the Roon forum, Brian and the others are quite quick to reply.