Signal Path- “Enhanced”?

Support
1

I’ve got a Rossini running the latest firmware and every time I play a MQA file, the signal path shows “enhanced” instead of “lossless”. How can I get rid of the “enhanced” audio signal path for MQA? I think it’s preferable to have all show “lossless” for optimum SQ! No? I can’t seem to find a setting I may have wrong.

Best,
Scott

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2

This is what Roon does. Whenever an MQA renderer is in the signal path Roon denotes it as “enhanced” as it is performing DSP operations. This is all purely cosmetic as there is no difference between the actual processing going on.

3

Hmmm. I have a Nucleus with a Vivaldi DAC in my other house and all formats say “lossless”! Why would the Nucleus/Rossini in my NY home, say enhanced and the Vivaldi say “lossless” for MQA files?

4

Not knowing the ins and outs of your other system I can’t tell you why you are seeing what you are on it. There are some scenarios in which the Vivaldi will show lossless along with no indication of the MQA renderer. These are all associated with some part of the connection between the upsampler and DAC being incorrect.

All I can tell you is that it’s a Roon requirement to show “Enhaced” when an MQA renderer is in the signal path. Being quite familiar with what is going on in the software I can also tell you two more things:

  1. Enhanced vs not is cosmetic and these are just words in Roon’s vocabulary. It’s just a way for Roon to differentiate between streams that have DSP (e.g. MQA) and those that don’t.
  2. No part of this behavior has changed in Mosaic from prior versions so if you aren’t seeing enhanced in your other system then something is incorrect in that configuration.
5

Thank you for your reply. I’ll discuss the settings in both systems with my dealer. I appreciate your feedback

Scott

6

My Vivaldi is without the upsampler. I’m using network bridge. Would that config make a difference? Both systems have Nucleus+, and both have clocks, the Rossini and Vivaldi clocks respectively!

7

The Network Bridge has no way of knowing the downstream capabilities of the DAC so all that it can report is that it is performing the decoding stage which Roon tags as “Lossless”. With the Upsampler in use (or with your Rossini) the network processor knows what’s happening downstream and reports it per Roon’s requirements.

This behavior started with network firmware 398 which was released last fall. It carried through to 406 (released in January) and will continue unless Roon changes their requirements again.

There’s more information in the 398 release notes (download the PDF at the bottom of this post):

8

Thanks Andrew