Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
Didn’t mention Siri. CarPlay is pointless without full Siri integration. Flicking through your library on a touchscreen while driving is absolutely not safe!
The Dark Side; Digital audio equipment recommendations and setup.
- Thread starter Ed Selley
- Start date
Didn’t mention Siri. CarPlay is pointless without full Siri integration. Flicking through your library on a touchscreen while driving is absolutely not safe!
LiamGallaghersBucketHat
Go on, geezer.
Anyone own or has used the Cambridge Audio CXN Network Streamer?
Looks interesting
Looks interesting
MikeH
Well-Known Member
I’m not a fan of Cambridge audio products. Don’t seem to last long
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
displayname
Well-Known Member
Yup, got the CXN v2 when it was a fairly new release. Honestly, I love it still. I mostly use it in 3 ways (listed in order of use)
1: Streaming via Tidal Connect
2: Using as DAC paired with CXC for CDs
3: Streaming via Spotify Connect
For me, Tidal and Spotify Connect are now a required function, and I won't consider any streamer without this functionality. I've looked at separate DACs, but honestly I'm impressed with the DAC that's in there and it would take some time and cash to get a significant upgrade in my opinion.
The only thing I can't speak to is streaming from a personal server. Just not something I do, so I haven't tested it. I have played files from a USB thumb drive without any issues, but also something I've only done a handful of times.
Russ I
Well-Known Member
I’ve got a question for you digital brainiacs. This will give you an idea of how digi-literate I am (not).
What are the advantages to a dedicated streamer over a laptop that can be directly connected to my DAC? Is there something different about the data passing through? Is it a convenience thing? What, if anything, is different?
What got me to wondering was seeing mention of the Time Machine for listening to live Dead shows. The website with the archive of all the free music (not only for the Dead) makes it very easy to just play that stuff through my laptop, so I’m wondering whether the Time Machine (as an example of a streamer, I assume) is just cool (it is!) because you can plug in a date and it will play that show? Or is there some other advantage I’m missing?
Thanks in advance.
What are the advantages to a dedicated streamer over a laptop that can be directly connected to my DAC? Is there something different about the data passing through? Is it a convenience thing? What, if anything, is different?
What got me to wondering was seeing mention of the Time Machine for listening to live Dead shows. The website with the archive of all the free music (not only for the Dead) makes it very easy to just play that stuff through my laptop, so I’m wondering whether the Time Machine (as an example of a streamer, I assume) is just cool (it is!) because you can plug in a date and it will play that show? Or is there some other advantage I’m missing?
Thanks in advance.
MikeH
Well-Known Member
The dead Time Machine thing seems mostly out of convenience/cool factor. Not sure if it has a built in DAC or what. How are you playing files from your laptop? Hardwired to an amp/speaker through headphone jack? or Bluetooth?
Russ I
Well-Known Member
My Quad Artera Play + has a USB input, so I'm using a USB cable from my laptop to the Artera, utilizing (I think!) the Artera's "ESS Sabre32 9018; a 32-bit, eight-channel hybrid multibit Delta-Sigma DAC".
MikeH
Well-Known Member
I’d just make sure your laptop’s OS isn’t doing any kind of downsampling. Not sure if it’s still the case, but for awhile Macs passed audio through an app called OSMixer and it sometimes downsampled or made volume adjustments. Roon kept saying it wasn’t passing through the highest res quality because of that until I disabled it. Not entirely sure if I would have noticed a substantial difference in sound quality though.
You can probably do a deep dive on the importance of clocking and jitter and stuff like that when it comes to digital…other people here probably know WAY more about it than I do
Russ I
Well-Known Member
That's interesting about the Mac. How did you disable it?
MikeH
Well-Known Member
Been awhile since I set it up but think I set the DAC to exclusive mode in Roon and that solved it.
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
A mixture of convince and the fact that computers in general are noisy devices. With hard drives and fans you get a digital noise and jitter supposedly that can be passed down the tracks. You can get things like the ifi iSilencer that claim to clean the signal up though and MacBooks supposedly tend to be not so bad offenders because they’re often fanless and with SSDs.
As for sampling if it’s PCM I’ve not ever noticed my MacBook downsampling right up to 24/192. There are limits to DSD I think and you might have to tweak the the settings for the individual DAC to stop that. It is really easy to check though. When it’s connected to the DAC you can get the settings through the volume icon on the right of the task bar across the top.
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Russ I
Well-Known Member
Thank you. One thing I had noticed was that my Quad always displayed the bit rate playing as 44.1 kHz, which didn't jive with the fact I was playing flac files. Took a bit of a deep dive into trying to figure out which end of the equation was responsible for the limitation, and discovered that the Macbook Pro doesn't seem to adapt to the native bit rate of the files I'm playing, but follows a fixed bit rate set within the Audio MIDI setup for the connected DAC. So I've now set that to 96k on the Macbook, and that's showing up on the Quad's display. It's not perfect, but then again, I'm not looking for perfection, just decent-sounding playback to take advantage of all the albums I've been able to download in flac.
displayname
Well-Known Member
Noise is a great call out.
Not only is the device noisy with moving parts, but the power supply is noisy too. This is confusing at first because you don’t really hear the power supply directly. It doesn’t make an actual sound. But that noise in the electrical signal raises the noise floor within the audio chain. This shows itself in imaging, clarity and depth.
Having said all that, I’d focus on a lot of other things first. If you don’t have good speaker placement, that alone will do worlds more than trying to clean up the signal from a computer to a streamer.
The real reason most people go with streamers is because it’s easy. Plug it in, add wifi or Ethernet and boom, you’re ready to go. Not a bad thing.
mdmost
Well-Known Member
Like a moth to a flame. Had to get another version of this. The upside is if you buy the highest quality DSD, they give you all the other resolutions.
www.highdeftapetransfers.ca
Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue - Includes Pitch Corrected Tracks
Artist(s): Trumpet – Miles Davis Tenor Saxophone – John Coltrane Alto Saxophone – Julian Adderly Bass – Paul Chambers Drums – James Cobb Piano – Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly (Track 2) Recording Info: Recorded At Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City, On March 2, 1959 (#1-3) And April 22, 1959...
www.highdeftapetransfers.ca
reformed audiophile
New Member
I've been using Roon for just about a year.
After doing the trial period I subscribed and set up my 'collection' by connecting to my Tidal account and just searching by artist and ticking the 'add to collection' button for those items I own. I was working off of a list I had already maintained of my CD collection and my Discogs list for vinyl. Where there are multiple versions available, you can choose which to add (deluxe edition, hi res, remix version, etc.). My first pass took a few hours after which I had about 2,000 albums catalogued.
After setting up the titles I owned that were 'streamable', I went back to rip those CDs that were not found on Tidal. I have a Bluesound Vault 2i that I like for this purpose as it seems to do a good job identifying and tagging CD rips on the fly. The Vault 2i has an ethernet connection to my computer, and is available for Roon to see it's hard drive. Roon is then used to search for the ripped files and those are added to my collection. I also have a small collection of downloaded CD quality and hi-res digital files, so those were added too.
Finally, there are some albums I own only on vinyl that I rip to 24/96 using my Tascam DA-3000. Full album sides get transferred to my desktop computer where I manually separate and tag the tracks using audio editing software. Once organized into folders, these files can all be added to my collection in Roon. This is the most labor intensive process for adding digital files to my library (the ripping and tagging part).
Once Roon has all the files, you can browse and play anything in your collection (or available to your streaming subscription) seamlessly regardless of whether it's coming in from the internet, or on a hard drive after being downloaded or ripped from CD or vinyl. I run the Roon remote app on an iPad and find the interface to be excellent. I was a BlueOS user for a few years and was pretty happy with that, but the Roon interface (imo) is significantly better.
Something I often do in Roon that might not be so important to other users is 'research'. When Roon displays tracks or artists, most names are 'hot spots' you can click to surf around. For example, when a track exists in more than one recording there's a little disc icon with a number next to it that when 'clicked' (or touched on the iPad) opens another screen of all the other versions of the song that Roon knows about - a great way to find cover versions of songs. If there's a particular artist or other credited person of interest, you can search Roon for that name and get a list of all appearances of that person. Want to know all the albums mastered by Bob Ludwig? Roon can do that - whether they are in your collection or not. And once the list is created, everything can be played immediately (or queued or saved in a playlist). Want to see all the records Dean Parks played on? Yup - easy to do. Very powerful stuff.
The metadata added by Roon is also particularly rich. Besides album and artist reviews, you will often get lyrics and even current tour information. Roon also has the ability to cast album art and artist photos (and optionally, song lyrics) on a TV in your listening room. I've also just begun using the tag function to personalize my collection entries. Using tagging, I can now grab a list of all my Mobile Fidelity or Analogue Productions recordings, as well as tribute albums, albums I own on vinyl or SACD (and any other category I dream up that I may want to use). Roon may not provide any 'listenable' content for the subscription price, but it has made interacting with my music collection way more efficient and (dare I say it), FUN.
At the moment I have Roon running on a Windows desktop machine using my iPad mini as a remote and my Oppo UDP203 as the endpoint. My Bluesound Vault 2i is networked using an ethernet connection and I have a couple of USB hard drives with digital files. Roon performs flawlessly in this configuration with excellent sound quality and quick response to commands and searching. Since Roon ARC was rolled out all of this access is available on my phone - in the car, on vacation. I can actually listen to my own vinyl rips in my wife's 2015 Honda Fit! I do not currently use any of the DSP or multiroom functions that are available.
For me it's been totally worth it - but more for the easy access to my collection and the extras I've described than for any specific performance aspect (though it does sound noticeably better than my Vault 2i).
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mdmost
Well-Known Member
That is a great detailed explanation and sounds really cool. I have a lot of different media on my computer such as vinyl rips, DSD, FLAC files, old Pono files, and others that I'm always going back and forth between the Pine Player and Qobuz. Does Roon support DSD and even SACD iso files? Not a huge deal but something I'd love to have it take care of for me.
Joe Mac
Well-Known Member
I don’t know if it’s plays SACD iso but I extracted them into individual DSF files using the sonore SACD extractor software and it played them perfectly.
reformed audiophile
New Member
I don't have any DSD files in Roon, but I checked their FAQs which indicate that DSD is supported - either as DSD-Direct or DSD to PCM.
Here's a link to the relevant article - it gets a little technical (don't trust my 'translation')...
Roon DSD FAQ
Roon DSD FAQ2
(added and fixed links)
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