Digital Speaker Balance Control with ROON
This is just an FYI for you ROON fanatics.
I sit slightly to the left of the center spot in my office system. I normally use the BALANCE control of my Benchmark HPA4 preamp to adjust for this seating position.
However, today I moved the HPA4 to my Livingroom and put in the Holo Serene in the office. The Serene does not have any features that you would like in a preamp, it just sounds rather good. So, no BALANCE control. I was willing to live with that since I want the HPA4 in the Livingroom.
I was wondering if ROON had anything for BALANCE since I was familiar with CONVOLUTION filters running on ROON. I had not seen the SPEAKER SETUP filter before (or maybe the current feature set was updated). There was a provision to set the distance from the 2 speakers to the seating position. I entered the magic numbers and had perfect balance. This was even better than the analog balance from the HPA4 preamp. It sounds great and bit perfect.
Love ROON. Killer features and I have NO issues with the sound.
I thought you needed to measure the room for the dB. Whatever, the case I am so impressed with this feature. I was considering selling the Holo Serene to get another Benchmark HPA4 preamp. However, now the need to do that is gone. In the future, I hope ROON can incorporate voice and ChatGPT. Sometimes I do not remember the name of a group or song. A conversational search would be an amazing feature. A feature like what I described is certainly doable with ROON.
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I have been using the Stereo Setup feature now for a couple of days and I must say this is a fantastic feature. It sounds way better than doing the same thing in the analog domain with my Benchmark HPA4 preamp. Only issue is that I get this benefit only with my streaming, not with my turner which I use from 9AM - 12PM M-F. You will notice how powerful ROON is if you have multiple zones and also use headphones. Adding convolution filters to specific endpoint also takes the complexity up a lot. It all works great, but I removed my Convolution filters after getting different gear. Using a Convolution filter would have also resolved my Balance issue but that is incredibly complicated to do correctly, and I only get a professional to create those filters. I used this guy in the past. Digital Room Calibration Services, Convolver, Headphone Filtersets (accuratesound.ca)
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Here is another tip. I have 3 streamers in the house for 3 DACs. There are 2 in the office and one of those streamers has the STEREO SETUP filter enabled. As of today, my headphone streamer does not have the STEREO SETUP enabled, since it is not needed. All is good. Someone contacted me today about buying my streamer for the headphones. Now if I sell it, I will have the LRS+ speaker settings with the STEREO SETUP filter. To solve this, I can create a named filter, say LRS+, and another named filter WITHOUT any filter settings, say naked. When I use the LRS+, I need to remember to change the endpoint filter to LRS+ and when using the headphones I need to change to the naked filter. Of course, I will now need to manually change the streamer cable from 1 DAC to the other.
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