Roon Discussion

When @yotacowboy does an electronic music recommendation, I either find it on Qobuz or on Bandcamp. I know Bandcamp isn't integrated in Roon, but you can listen to an album as much as you want on OMG MP3 QUALITY before making a decision to spend a few bucks to get the album in FLAC/Apple Lossless/whatever. At that point it'll be in your Roon library (or on me, also my UPnP server). I know people stream like mad, but Bandcamp really makes it welcoming to buy stuff.

Sweet. When I had other crapper Fire tablets I always hated the Hori view on the 8 inch Fire tablets from Amazon. Hori view looks great thou on the 10 in Fire tablets that I have right now (the current gen as of the date of this post). If you guys aren't aware, you have to sideload Google Play store (super easy to do) in order to run them on a Fire tablet.

The real question when 1.8 rolls around next week is what is the lowest version of Android it will support? Since Amazon uses their own fork of Android (that isn't current), you get situations when not all Android apps will work on a Fire tablet. Thankfully the current Fire 10 in tablets Fire OS is based on Android 9.0 Pie, so in theory it should work with no issues next week.

 

Sooo, you fellas got me to sign up for a month's Qobuz so I can update my comparison vs Tidal for the kind of indie/electronic stuff I mostly listen to. Fortunately, it's been a quiet afternoon at work...

Out of 895 albums in the genres "Electronic" and "Alternative/Indie Rock" in my local roon library:
On Tidal but not Qobuz = 37
On Qobuz but not Tidal = 6
I'm quite surprised that Qobuz was missing something as major as the recent Nine Inch Nails releases, the 3 Chromatics albums I have and also a couple of Teenage Fanclubs. Tidal on the other hand was missing my 3 Squarepusher albums.

So I figured I'd check my jazz albums as Qobuz is meant to be good for that genre (out of 281 albums):
On Tidal but not Qobuz = 2
On Qobuz but not Tidal = 0
In fairness, none of my jazz albums are particularly obscure, so this result probably doesn't mean much.

So, that's my sample of one analysis . I have the whole list of missing albums if anyone is interested (like I said, slow work afternoon).

 

I assumed you used Focus to figure this out @pedalhead. How did you do it without manually counting/comparing? I want to do the same...seems like I have done this before but I can't figure it out at the moment...

 

Yep, I used the Focus feature to select the genres, then just clicked on each album individually to see if there were Tidal & Qobuz versions (it was a bit laborious).

Despite Tidal coming out on top again, I'm actually inclined to move over to Qobuz. I downgraded to the 320kbps Tidal tier last year because I was only using it for finding music which I then would subsequently buy on Bandcamp or elsewhere anyway. £5/month extra for Qobuz 24-bit streaming is pretty tempting though and, well, f**k Bob and his MQA.

 

After some rather disappointing months with Audirvana I am about to get a Roon lifetime license. Already the first day of the trial convinced me. But there's one open question for me: Digital room correction which is a must for me.

Since Roon does not and will not support VST plugins, I have to look for a new solution. Having used Dirac and currently happily using Sonarworks I will only switch because I have to.

So far I have found the following solutions that work with Roon:

• Room EQ Wizard (free, but not easy to use)
• Acourate (340 Euro, rather complex and not easy to use)
• Audiolense (390 Euro, similar to Acourate, but maybe a little easier to use)
• Home Audio Fidelity Service (you send in your measurements and Thierry will create the filters. The only solution that incorporates "cross talk cancellation filters", see here:
  • you pay for each service of him creating the filters which is not too great since I have three different listening spots to correct. Also manually editing the filters is not possible as far as I can see. Depending on the service the prices range from 109 to 189 Euro for the most interesting filter options: https://www.homeaudiofidelity.com/english/pricing-contact/

What are you guys using and why? Any thoughts are highly appreciated.

 

I don’t suppose Dirac or Sonarworks will export Convolution files? I’ve used REW to do that, but it is a bit of a pain you’re right. I’ve thought of putting a MiniDSP (digital to digital) into the digital part of my chain, but not really looked into it.

BTW, welcome to Club Roon. The thing “just works”, and works beautifully (other than this room correction stuff perhaps).

 

I never thought of exporting filters from Sonarworks. I don't think this is possible but I will mail the support right now. That would be fantastic, of course. But there are some (few) people in the Roon forums talking about this stuff and something like this was never mentioned.

MiniDSP could be a solution if I wasn't using Multibit DACs. Of course one could do that but on principle I don't want any A/D after my Yggdrasil. OTOH John Darko mentioned in a video that he could hear different cartridges on his turntable even with active speakers with DSP in the chain.

And thanks for the warm welcome Concerning the UI: Foobar just does what I expect it to do. Roon does that as well and additionally surprises me with small but nice and nifty features. Audirvana just fails on almost every level except sound quality. But that doesn't help me when I get mad all the time because the UI is just fucked up.

 

Neither do I, which is why I suggested a D-to-D version - no analog conversion.

Like this (again I’ve not looked in any level of detail at it - might be cheaper options as well): https://www.minidsp.com/products/dirac-series/product-line-summary

 

Yea, I don't think SonarWorks and Dirac export convolution files, as that might be shooting themselves in their feet.

As for using REW, there are quite a few video guides out there to help you measure and generate a convolution filter within the app. After you try it once, you will realise it is quite straight forward. However, in my experience, while the convolution filter did help fix the low end issues, for some reason, it seemed to roll off the upper-treble, which killed some air and affected the imaging precision and depth perception, despite the conv file not having any filter addressing the treble frequencies. I don't know if what I experienced was an one-off issue or, if it is common.

Edit: @econaut , I think what @rlow was recommending from MiniDSP was something like this, which will live before the Yggdrasil in the chain and not after it, so you don't have to worry about A/D post Yggdrasil.

 

@rlow @EagleWings Thanks for clarifying and please excuse my sloppy reading. Concerning MiniDSP I was not up to date. I didn't know they had all digital solutions or maybe it wasn't suitable for my older setups and I forgot about it.

Still I'd prefer a software solution which I can use on two computers at two different locations and not having another device standing around that consumes power. But good to know that it's available as a possible alternative!

 

Found something interesting in the Roon forums. A comparison between different room correction software, albeit from 2017:

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-room-correction-in-the-future/30383/21?u=econaut

 

I don't remember the details right now, but I set up Sonarworks Systemwide to output into a BlackHole loopback, and used that to take "measurements" in REW to generate convolution files to use in Roon.

 

Awww yisssss:

 

For my needs, Spotify is awesome because it helps me find new music so, so well! Once I find an album that I want to be hi-res, I buy it.

 

Hm, interesting, but also sounds a little too complicated for me without a tutorial or something similar. Were you happy with these filters?

Currently I tend heavily towards Home Audio Fidelity Service, mainly because it's the easiest way when you can't use Sonarworks or Dirac and what I read from happy users and my good communication with Thierry convinces me.

1.8 lets me scroll vertically through my albums, great. Unfortunately I not only find it uglier than before, it also got rid of my settings menu and fucked up the UI a little:

https://imgur.com/vqNSM0C

https://imgur.com/JoVzVJ6

 

So far so good on Roon 1.8. Thankfully they still kept Dark Mode. I can also confirm that Roon Remote will work just fine on the latest version of Fire 10 Tablet (since on that tablet Fire OS is based on Android 9.0) if you slideload Google Play Store.

 

A

Also, love that I can update my core from the remote app. #lazy

 

Oh crap, they changed the Roon app icon too. It’s so frickin plain now I thought it was gone off my phone!

Great now I get to play “Where’s Roono” every time I want to use it...

 

I realize this is incredibly minor, but they changed the highlight color in dark mode to purple and I AM LIVING FOR IT. Selfish opinion because that is my favorite color scheme, but it just looks so much slicker than the neon blue they had before.

EDIT: In actual important quality of life changes though, I am no longer getting the "Searching for core" screen every time I boot up the android app, actually fairly snappy and just opens. Fingers crossed that lasts, if so, true game changer.

 

Shucks, my android phone autoupdated to 1.8. I remember now not finding a way to set it to manual update without turning off updates entirely in the PlayStore. Holding off on core update for now to let y'all find the bugs.