Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Hardware with Roon Application Roon 1.5 and Meridian SE best setup

Hi everybody,

What is the best setup in Roon 1.5 and Meridian 218 with 5200SE?

Thanks for your suggestion,
Gaf

Hi Gaf,

In Roon go to Settings --> Audio Devices and select your 218 zone.

Device Setup [For the 218 Zone]

- MQA Capabilities = Decoder and Renderer.
- Enable MQA Core Decoder = Yes [Typically this be on, unless the user wishes to force Roon never to decode MQA]

With this configuration, there are two possibilities:

1 - Roon DSP off: Roon passes the bit perfect undecoded MQA to the 218.
2 - Roon DSP on: Roon decodes MQA, extracts the MQA rendering information, applies DSPs, re-inserts info, and passed the decoded MQA to the 218.

Perfect... not quite, unfortunately at present due to a firmware limitation the 218 (or SE DSPs) will not render the decoded MQA stream from Roon.

Thus with #2 a compromise has to be made as it is not possible a present to have both Roon DSP and Meridian MQA rendering
This is a user choice, only you can decide which is best for you, on your system, in your roon, etc.

Trust this helps,

Regards,
Carl

PS Roon tell us that Meridian are aware and will develop a solution, no time frame given of course.

Ok, thank you for the explanation.

I did some test changing on the fly the "enable core decoder" option in Roon.
It was strange that the sound doesn't drop while I do the change.

In my opinion the best option should be to unselect ”enable core decoder" and leave the decoding stage to Meridian 218 and the rendering stage to Meridian speaker Special edition, considering they have the MQA decoding and rendering capability inside.

This should be more correct with this configuration? In general I consider the hardware decoding superior that the software decoding.

Gaf

There seems to be some misunderstanding about 'enable core decoder'. There is no reason to disable it unless you never want Roon to decode under any circumstances. In general, what Roon does with an MQA stream is determined by the 'MQA decoder and Renderer' settings. If they are set fully to 'decoder and renderer' then Roon will not touch the MQA stream even though the 'enable core decode' is set to 'on'. I think that's why it's hidden away in the Advanced Settings, as you are not expected to need to touch it in normal circumstances.