And that initial Pi4 w/Ropieee purchase can scaled pretty damned well with a clean LPS and a good hat like the Pi2AES.
Speaking of Roon. I was a bad end user and neglected my usual back up routine. Somehow or other my main music library drive in the Roon Core crapped out. Just uped and lost the file allocation table. Usin exfat. Never had I experienced that before, but lesson is, back up.
Luckily I only lost four or five things that I had ripped and moved over the my ripped CD drive so I had them. And the only thing I did lose, someone on the forum was very helpful in the recovery process.
Overall a small price to pay in what is a very important lesson. My music library is probably the only thing I’d rescue after my doggies if my house was on fire, yet here I was being lazy with the backups.
Yes happens I’ve lost a couple of disks over the last 20 years or so.
The one thing to be aware of is that RAID rarely saves you, if one drive fails there is a good chance the other drive is from the same batch and it has exactly the same workload on it.
Real backups are essential, minimally to a separate physical disk, better to something outside the box.
I have not figured out back-up process for my innuos and roon yet, i tried a 1 terabyte thumb drive on the innous and that did not work, then i tried a 1 terabyte portable drive and could not figure that out either. Next i want to try of those nas drives i hear meniomed amd thus put all my music on it so ican access it from all my laptops and also have my roon back-ed up so that i don’t lose my playlists like has happened to me 2x when updating
I was at another site earlier responding to a post and was thinking we needed a Roon Runners here - turns out there was, but I am now happy to see it out in the open.
I really enjoy roon and even tho I’m not yet fully tapping its potential as a library content manager, I am enjoying the core as a server and then being able to stream to pretty much wherever I want, using different endpoints pi, pc etc. whichever is most convenient for the desired location.
I am currently still using an old (decrepit to me and my snob standards for a pc power plant) machine as the core, but I am going to setup a NUC/ROCK instead shortly. I also am using a PC that is next to my primary headphone setup as the endpoint via USB into my DAC and I want to eliminate the PC (at least as the source for roon input) so I’ll be looking for something like a pi2aes to keep it simple, or I could use an Allo DigiOne I have that is limited to coax spidif out and run that into a Xspdif 2 I have and then AES or I2S into the DAC… Lots of options - that is what I like about roon. Also, I don’t know if its my head or what, but when I stream via roon it sounds better - even if it is Qobuz streamed via roon vs Qobuz streamed direct from Qobuz app though the same signal path.
I actually can not do this and still utilize the Allo DigiOne hat - because the only input on the X-spdif 2 is USB. The DigiOne hat is spdif only output. I could just use a hat-less pi and usb from that into the x-spdif, but if doing all that might as well just run USB from the PC into the x-spdif … I suppose there is the DigiOne Signature maybe or similar that has USB out. I could be overthinking the whole eliminating the PC from my primary setup. The DAC I’m using has a very good USB implementation and I believe that the USB implementation is even a higher quality than the spdif input on that DAC.
microRendu – Small Green Computer (+ nice psu, or go ultrarendu if you can lol), should be a great sounding unit and works with roon too. You could also move to a usbridge signature player but I’d suggest going higher with the level of dac you have (along with possibly moving up the usb cable ladder as well)
Another good alternative to sonore would be something from sotm but that’s going to cost more
If you wanted to keep using a pc and not move to a streamer, you could go for a usb regen system
So shortly after the 1.8 update went live I noticed SQ took a hit when I compared it to Audirvana.
The bass wasn’t as full and the vocals were oddly more in your face.
With the next few updates after that SQ was pretty much indistinguishable from Audirvana.
I was just curious if I’m the only one that noticed this or if I’m just hearing things?
I didn’t use any filters or dsp whatsoever, just stock form on both.
I didn’t notice anything, it would need a pretty big fuckup for the server to affect sound quality (assuming no signal processing).
I mean it’s possible, they could have done something dumb like accidentally inverted absolute phase, or mishandle something but RAAT is an extremely simple protocol, it just pushes bit down a wire uncompressed, there is no clock, the client buffers it and generates the clock so…
I mean I don’t work for roon, but if I were in their engineering dept I’d expect to have tests that would confirm RAAT stream were correctly constructed from a given known input.
They did have a weird case at one point where of one of the roon ready streamers (might have been Auralic) bypassed some of it’s processing when used as a Roon endpoint, so sounded better via the native streaming app.
There isn’t really any good or bad in it, it’s just an indicator of how much volume difference there is between the quiet bits and the loud bits.
High dynamic range is prevalent in a lot of orchestral recordings.
I’ve always just thought it was an interesting indicator, outside of occasionally limiting how much I turn the volume up at the start of a high dynamic range track, I really haven’t used it for much.
It’s a weird way of measuring it, I’d assume it’s showing the RMS average loudness of the track, but from what I know the numbers can be measured differently (could be an average to peak of the entire song, or an average of the loudest 20% of the song, or what have you) so it’s iffy on how useful it is to compare if the DR has been measured by different methods/software
If you truly wanted to measure loudness I’d personally put more merit into ITU type loudness measurements like LUFS, but regardless of that it’s a number to not really worry about. IMO DR is an overly simplistic way to look at dynamic range and doesn’t really give you as much insight as other methods of measuring. Looking at the dynamic range doesn’t really tell you anything about how something sounds anyways. You could have a recording that’s DR7 that sounds much better than something DR14, all depends. I’d really suggest just ignoring it and not putting too much thought toward it
It’s typically said that 0-7DR is bad, 8-10DR is ok, 11-13 is good, and anything past that is very good, but again that says nothing about the actual track in sound outside very basic things like “is it brickwalled or not”
Yes this is my issue with the number it’s unclear what it actually is, pretty much all you get from it is 12 is more than 7 and less that 20.
Without knowing how long the windows are and how they are weighting the “loudness” it’s not a very meaningful number.
As I said still valuable to a point when you see a classical track at 20dB dynamic range, it reminds you it’s going to get a lot louder.
I don’t think it’s indicative of quality per se.
Totally agree, it’s interesting but too convoluted and simplistic to be all that useful (although it begs the question if any number metric could give much insight into the real quality of music)
