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Review and Measurements of Chromecast Audio Digital Output

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amirm

amirm

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Do you think it was resampled?
No I don't. The distortions are very different. It seems to suffer from compression artifacts. And I can't figure out why they would resample from 44.1 to something else.
 

gvl

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No I don't. The distortions are very different. It seems to suffer from compression artifacts. And I can't figure out why they would resample from 44.1 to something else.

They did at some point on the CCA itself I believe, I think that was fixed in a later firmware release. That may have had something to do with playing compressed streams.
 
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amirm

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P.S. When I tested gapless in lossy formats years ago WMA Pro was the clear winner. @amirm was that deliberate or fluke?
I can't think of any feature we put in WMA Pro to make it work better in this manner.
 
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Did you buy yours before Roon officially supported it?
Yes. If I am not mistaken, I bought it last year. But I think I powered it on 3-4 months ago and it may have updated then.

I received the announcement from Roon on 7/6/2018 and I am fairly certain that was after I powered it on.
 

gvl

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Yes. If I am not mistaken, I bought it last year. But I think I powered it on 3-4 months ago and it may have updated then.

I received the announcement from Roon on 7/6/2018 and I am fairly certain that was after I powered it on.

Hmm, perhaps they did have to jump through hoops to make gapless happen. Apparently it works, so it is a strong case for the Roon/CCA tandem, unless of course you also want to use Tidal or Spotify at the same time :)
 

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If I were Roon, I would implement gapless playback in a device independent way by prefetching future tracks and streaming them together.

This would probably entail decompressing them (if compressed) and resampling in Roon to a common sampling rate.
 

garbulky

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So what's the differnece between the first obviously poor performing graph and the one where it does good? I don't understand how they can be different.
 

gvl

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As far as I understand we can safely ignore the first graph as the bad performance it shows has nothing to do with the CCA device itself, it shows that the Chrome Browser that supports the CCA isn't bit-accurate. The second graph shows that playback to CCA through Roon is in fact bit-accurate. Only the rest of the graphs in the OP actually show jitter.
 
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Blumlein 88

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Could you at some point try streaming from an Android device to CCA and see if the jitter is still horrible? Using one of the better Android playback apps. Maybe Muzecast, Pulse player, Neutron player or Media Monkey all of which say they work with Chromecast .
 
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Does Roon really cost USD$119 per year? To manage you own music?
It does. Most of that is to pay for the metadata they had to license. I purchased a lifetime license for some $400 a few years ago. It is worth every penny. Some of the best software ever written.
 

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It does. Most of that is to pay for the metadata they had to license. I purchased a lifetime license for some $400 a few years ago. It is worth every penny. Some of the best software ever written.

How do you use it? You have a big collection of off-line music? I'm mostly streaming these days, Tidal/Spotify. I always thought it was kind of useless for streaming.
 
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How do you use it? You have a big collection of off-line music? I'm mostly streaming these days, Tidal/Spotify. I always thought it was kind of useless for streaming.
Roon treats my library and Tidal as one in the same. When I find something on Tidal, I just tell it to "add to my library" and from there on, it is indistinguishable from my ripped and downloaded high-res music. As you though, most of my consumption these days is from Tidal through Roon.

The integration is neat in the way I play something I have bought and I just click on the artist and Roon shows me all the rest of their music in Tidal. I then add those and have a full library of anything I wish to have. Playback is then seamless between Tidal or local library.

Indeed using Tidal is one of the best reasons to use Roon.
 

gvl

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