[Krutsch]

Display on my BDP-1 no longer updates during Roon playback.

If the machine was idle for a while, this means a blank display. If the display was saying "Roon Ready", it stays on that. No song information, at all.

S2.36 2017-10-06
Build: Manic Moose
MPD: 0.19.21 NEWS
Kernel: 3.16-0.bpo.2-486
COPYRIGHT BRYSTON LTD. 2010

[unincognito]

Its being looked into, transport controls
 also appear to be effected.

[Krutsch]

Its being looked into, transport controls
 also appear to be effected.

This appears to be working now, so I am guessing this was a Roon issue, as I am on the stable release (S2.36 2017-10-06)

[zoom25]

The latest Roon 1.4 is a sonic treat with the BDP-1. Whatever optimizations they made to RAAT, it's taken things up a notch.

[gbaby]

I hate to say this, but you folks can Roon and Tidal all you want, but the best sonic experience from the BDPs is from importing the music from a CD and putting it on one of the USB drive inputs.

[Krutsch]

I hate to say this, but you folks can Roon and Tidal all you want, but the best sonic experience from the BDPs is from importing the music from a CD and putting it on one of the USB drive inputs.

... using a flash drive 

[gbaby]

... using a flash drive 

True! In fact, I find Tidal to be slightly better sounding than the best radio stations on the Bryston BDP-2. However, the best sound were those I imported myself from CDs with a close second best being hi res downloads from HD Tracks. I am not too impressed with hi res as it sounds louder but not necessarily better sounding; just different. Regular old 44.1/16 from CDs just sound more natural.

[CanadianMaestro]

No contest.

[zoom25]

Funny. Last night after over a month, I put a bunch of albums on a flash drive and used MPD with everything else disabled. I compared it to Roon 1.4 via my ethernet setup with the same albums. Both setups were running bit perfect. No DSP. I have paid attention to my ethernet setup with shielded cables around the gear and grounded linear power supplies, so that may be the reason.

Roon trounced MPD in every sonic aspect. The difference has never been this big. No need to strain to hear it.

[gbaby]

Funny. Last night after over a month, I put a bunch of albums on a flash drive and used MPD with everything else disabled. I compared it to Roon 1.4 via my ethernet setup with the same albums. Both setups were running bit perfect. No DSP. I have paid attention to my ethernet setup with shielded cables around the gear and grounded linear power supplies, so that may be the reason.

Roon trounced MPD in every sonic aspect. The difference has never been this big. No need to strain to hear it.

What device do you use to import your CDs and are you using flac, wav, aiff, which?

[zoom25]

What device do you use to import your CDs and are you using flac, wav, aiff, which?

With MPD, I'd use WAV.

With Roon, I use FLAC, since PCM is sent to BDP-1. Compressed or uncompressed doesn't matter anymore with Roon and BDP-1. It gets the same PCM.

Most of my stuff is digital download now. Even though I'm a Mac guy, I'd rip in bulk on my spare Windows laptop using Exact Audio Copy. There's good stuff on Mac as well. I use XLD for all the transcoding. The better the rips and metadata is on the original file, the better the experience on Roon.

[gbaby]

With MPD, I'd use WAV.

With Roon, I use FLAC, since PCM is sent to BDP-1. Compressed or uncompressed doesn't matter anymore with Roon and BDP-1. It gets the same PCM.

Most of my stuff is digital download now. Even though I'm a Mac guy, I'd rip in bulk on my spare Windows laptop using Exact Audio Copy. There's good stuff on Mac as well. I use XLD for all the transcoding. The better the rips and metadata is on the original file, the better the experience on Roon.

Are you importing CDs using wav? Or are you buying digital download in the wav format? Its hard to tell from your description.

[zoom25]

Are you importing CDs using wav? Or are you buying digital download in the wav format? Its hard to tell from your description.

Whether I rip or download, I always go with FLAC. That is my main and master library. For BDP and MPD use specifically, I used to maintain a duplicate WAV library that came from the FLAC library. I'd use XLD to do batch conversions. 2 hard drives - same music - just different format (FLAC vs WAV).

Since I've started using Roon with BDP-1, I no longer have the need for a WAV library. I just use my FLAC library and let Roon uncompress it to PCM before it sends to BDP-1.

If you're still confused:

Roon + BDP-1: Use FLAC, no need for WAV.

MPD + BDP-1: It's a tossup. Some don't hear any difference between FLAC and WAV. Others that do, generally prefer WAV. I went with WAV.

[gbaby]

Whether I rip or download, I always go with FLAC. That is my main and master library. For BDP and MPD use specifically, I used to maintain a duplicate WAV library that came from the FLAC library. I'd use XLD to do batch conversions. 2 hard drives - same music - just different format (FLAC vs WAV).

Since I've started using Roon with BDP-1, I no longer have the need for a WAV library. I just use my FLAC library and let Roon uncompress it to PCM before it sends to BDP-1.

If you're still confused:

Roon + BDP-1: Use FLAC, no need for WAV.

MPD + BDP-1: It's a tossup. Some don't hear any difference between FLAC and WAV. Others that do, generally prefer WAV. I went with WAV.

Your original comment was that Roon and Tidal trounces MPD on every sonic aspect. I tried to determine if your were importing your files from CD or if you are using downloads. I tried to find out if you were importing your CDs if you were using aiff, wav or flac or other means. You seem to be saying that you imported your music using one codec and make batch files using XLD which may be the problem. Your answers have not been explicit enough for me to determine why you say Roon MPD which no one concurs. But, regardless enjoy your Roon. You don't have to explain any further. 

[zoom25]

Your original comment was that Roon and Tidal trounces MPD on every sonic aspect. I tried to determine if your were importing your files from CD or if you are using downloads. I tried to find out if you were importing your CDs if you were using aiff, wav or flac or other means. You seem to be saying that you imported your music using one codec and make batch files using XLD which may be the problem. Your answers have not been explicit enough for me to determine why you say Roon MPD which no one concurs. But, regardless enjoy your Roon. You don't have to explain any further. 

Either I have been very unclear, or you simply do not understand how any of this works.

Whether I rip a CD or get a digital download, it does not matter as long as the information in the file is the same, meaning they are the same master on the CD and the download file. It's all 0 and 1 and easily verifiable.

Whenever I download from a store or rip a CD, the format is always FLAC (lossless but compressed).

You should know that both WAV and FLAC are lossless and identical in data. FLAC is compressed, whereas WAV is not (uncompressed). I only made a duplicate library with WAV for MPD use, so the BDP-1 itself won't have to do decompression like it would with FLAC.

With Roon, the subject of compression does not matter because Roon uncompresses all lossless formats to the same PCM before sending it to BDP-1. So whether you use WAV or FLAC in Roon, once the information gets to the BDP-1, it sees the same thing (PCM).

Do you know what batch conversion and transcoding is....? All I'm doing is making a duplicate from FLAC to WAV on a separate hard drive. The data is still the same. It's just uncompressed so the BDP-1 won't have to work harder. I'm not combining multiple tracks to one track. What I mean by "batch conversion" is that I can convert multiple folders of FLAC to WAV automatically.

In this whole process, data is never changed or corrupted. It's still the same data as it was in the studio master. Compression or decompression has nothing to do with that.

[zoom25]

As to why Roon might sound better than MPD:

1) With typical MPD use, you'd plug USB flash drives or hard drives into the USB port. This is bad for two reasons. First, it can put a stress on the power supply of the BDP-1 which can negatively affect performance. Second, all that electrical noise that the flash drive or SSD or hard drive generates goes to the BDP-1 as well. This can also negatively affect performance.

Ethernet is better for electrical isolation than USB, especially when the network gear is powered by grounded linear power supplies (like in my case).

2) Software and resource usage:

With Roon, all the library management and processing happens away from the BDP-1. With MPD, all of that processing happens inside the BDP-1. You can also verify this partially by going to the 'Services' tab in Manic Moose and comparing the CPU %.

Give this a read from Roon and PS Audio:

https://kb.roonlabs.com/Sound_Quality

http://www.psaudio.com/pauls-posts/usb-vs-ethernet/

[zoom25]

Also, I don't use TIDAL with Roon. I only use my own physical music. It's the same music that gets played with MPD or Roon.

[Krutsch]

With MPD, I'd use WAV.

With Roon, I use FLAC, since PCM is sent to BDP-1. Compressed or uncompressed doesn't matter anymore with Roon and BDP-1. It gets the same PCM.

Most of my stuff is digital download now. Even though I'm a Mac guy, I'd rip in bulk on my spare Windows laptop using Exact Audio Copy. There's good stuff on Mac as well. I use XLD for all the transcoding. The better the rips and metadata is on the original file, the better the experience on Roon.

You should be careful recommending WAV for MPD use, as MPD and Manic Moose struggle with reading tag data from WAV files. FLAC is the most robust choice, from a tag perspective.

[gbaby]

Zoom25, I apologize for my somewhat snarky and poorly written last post. But, without making things too complicated, I own a couple of thousand CDs so I import all my music using iTunes and importing the CDs using aiff files. I also own a few hi res albums from HD Tracks that I import as aiff files at 192/24 PCM. I have used both Roon and Tidal, but I find the best sound from my BDP-2 is from my own imported aiff files and not from Tidal or the hi res files from HD Tracks. I find the USB flash drives with 128 or 256 gigabytes of space to be totally sufficient without the use of a built in hard drive. I think that using Roon and Tidal are a waste of money, and for those who use Tidal to hear new music, you can do the same for free with the BDP-2 built in radio stations of every genre.

[zoom25]

You should be careful recommending WAV for MPD use, as MPD and Manic Moose struggle with reading tag data from WAV files. FLAC is the most robust choice, from a tag perspective.

Isn't the english language great.  "I'd use"...it was meant as in the past "I would use" rather than suggestion "I'd use X if I were you"

Yeah, I think that should be clear about WAV and FLAC. That's why I mentioned I always have a FLAC master library for downloading and ripping. WAV only as a second experimental library. Cheers!