keith_correa
Well-Known Member
You can make a copy and edit it but if what you mean is a synched Tidal playlist then AFAIK no. It was on the "to do" list but they didn't give this much priority.
Black Friday Roon Labs
- Thread starter Vivek Batra
- Start date
Indranil Sen
Active Member
In my comparison (in my 2 Channel system) against Audirvana and JRiver, Roon sounded the best. SQ was better because it brought the noise floor further down than any of the two softwares that I compared with Roon.
how can a software remove noise if it is already present in the recording or it it generated in the chain of equipment?
Roon OS can be run as follows:
1. Install full Roon software on your laptop/PC with playback directly via your USB DAC or to any other device on which Roonbridge is installed
2. Roon server on one PC which then becomes headless and control it with Roon GIU installed on another PC or via Roon app installed on your phone/tablet
I have a laptop that has been extremely optimised for audio. It is a very old laptop and due to hardware limitation, it could not run the Roon OS with GUI, so I installed the server on it and controlled it from Roon installed on my regular-use laptop.
On my Digione Signature running MoODe, I have Roonbridge installed.
So Roon GUI from my regular-use laptop, controls the Roon server on the optimised laptop with Roonbridge as playback device.
The other direct option I have is to connect my Roon server laptop via USB to my DAC for playback to avoid any kind of streaming.
Indranil Sen
Active Member
One of the benefits of using a purpose driven software/music streaming application like Roon or Audirvana etc is to by pass the OS and its unnecessary interference with music streaming and isolate that functionality from a very noise computer environment. The better the software the greater level of isolation and there is less garbage getting into the signal/streaming parh. That is perceived as clarity in sound and reduction of noise floor. But as you mentioned this doesn't address many other upstream noise issue that you might have in your system. Hopefully that makes sense.
Thanks.
This can be done with a simple WASAPI or the specific ASIO driver for the DAC being used which will then bypass the windows software audio interface.
There are however innumerable tweaks in Windows by removing innumerable background applications and many other aspects not needed for a dedicated music machine so that most of the resources are directed for music playback. like @keith_correa had mentioned he can write an entire bibliography on this.
But in my opinion, no software can isolate the noisy environment of a PC, yes it can improve stuff like buffering to improve latency. It is possible some music softwares also run some kind of internal DSP engine to tweak the output.
JRIver has one of the most powerful DSP plugin that a user can deploy, with Foobar (as it is freeware) one needs to install external DSP plugins.
Noise in any form cannot be mitigated with software.
shankarcams
Active Member
I used Sonos and physical CDs a lot earlier. I took a trial of Roon and in a head to head Roon was so far ahead it was a no contest.
The app is good but Sonos is also not bad.
The only downside of Roon for me is that once in a while it slows down massively.
Thanks for saying this... Yes i have not observed any discernible difference between my jriver setup vs roon... Though my equipment is entry level so maybe that's what masking the difference...
But audio wise I would happily give up on roon for my jriver once the trial expires... The visual interface is something I will definitely miss... Bubbleupnp does a good job but alas it is not a dedicated music visual interface like roon so it's unfair to compare them
keith_correa
Well-Known Member
No player can bypass the OS and output sound. At best, using particular output modes of the OS (like WASAPI exclusive or Kernel Streaming) or similar (like ASIO), the data path can bypass some layers of the OS. The OS does not by itself interfere with anything audio; interference (not the right term, but it'll do) is a side effect of the OS doing other stuff that it is meant to do by design and which it does.
Lowering the noise floor is not a function of a better software player. It is a function of tweaking the OS to not do things that it normally does and which are not required for an audio player to work. Or even if it does things, to do them in a way that audio is not affected negatively.
Indranil Sen
Active Member
Hello keith_correa & Kannan,
I do understand your argument and it would make sense for an integrated system where the network player is part of the computer that works as a music server. In my case of separates, the Roon core is installed in a dedicated purpose-built server and the only work it does is retrieve/stream music from the internal SSD of the server over ethernet. It is not a Roon endpoint or a player. However it performs better, in my set up, than the two other softwares Audirvana and JRiver that I compared with Roon. I am sure that it must be using tools like WASAPI, ASIO, etc internally to optimize its performance in that dedicated sever environment. To me this results into a relatively cleaner audio output which is what I wanted to communicate. If you guys think that it is something other than a lower noise floor then I am fine with it but I personally would not be convinced.
Thanks for your detailed feedback, very informative indeed.
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Got mail from Roon regarding updates, noticed improvement in "Search" option.
Yeah, they released the 1.8 this week.
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