About ready to give up on Roon and my streamer
Last December I started a thread to address the question of whether a true AES/EBU cable would sound better than a standard XLR when connecting my Sonnet Morpheus DAC to a Sonnet Hermes streamer. As the discussion evolved, (and in the end I abandoned both connections in favor of I2S via ethernet cable) I began sharing my trials and tribulations setting up Roon and getting it to work. Though I was finally successful and did get to spend some quality time streaming favorite music through Qobuz on the Roon platform, I've never been entirely happy with the sound. Apart from the headaches of getting everything to connect together every time I turn it on, I've also experienced some bizarre intermittent sound quality issues with Roon that I'm becoming very frustrated with. Sometimes it sounds pretty good, and sometimes it sounds tinny, shrill, and no stereo image. I haven't changed any settings anywhere, but something's clearly not getting processed correctly. At this point I'm tired of fighting with it.
What I'd really like to do is take Roon out of the equation entirely and connect directly to Qobuz through a streamer, but the Sonnet Hermes is designed to be a Roon endpoint and as far as I can tell, nothing more. If there's a way to get it to connect directly to Qobuz, I'd surely like to know about it.
Meanwhile, I'm happy to take suggestions for a streamer in the $1K to 1.5K range (new or used, happy with either) that can do this. I really don't want anything with a built-in DAC, as I'm really happy with mine, despite some minor shortcomings in its array of input connections.
Advice greatly appreciated. Thanks!
I gave up on Roon and then came back at it. You can read gobs about how to get a lot more out of it right here on Agon (how’s ‘dem Apples) forum. The sound from my Lumin app is a titch better but not a deal breaker. Roon nucleus, filtered Ethernet, bandwidth and the whole supporting web of parts matter. Taint cheap but in the world of things audiophile it’s a far lessor ticket item. This might be of interest. |
You gut reaction will be this is too cheap to be any good, it is GREAT, The Martin Logan Unison. It does Quoboz, DLNA, DTS Play-Fi AND it has ARC room correction (which is why I use it and recommend it). I don't use the preamp feature. I use the toslink out into my DAC.It smokes much more $$$ streamers IMO. Check out the streamer here: https://www.martinlogan.com/en/product/unison review here: How it measures in my room:
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roon brings alot of value otherwise it would not exist but it does take some knowhow, some $$ and some patience to make it work no doubt other companies get streaming to work well without roon like anything else in this hifi hobby, there is no one size fits all it took me a while to subscribe to roon, but now that i have i love it, and i do not believe it hurts streaming sonics at all |
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