Lyngdorf TDAI 3400

[tmallin]

RC22, I really don't want to follow the Menu steps you suggest for the simple reason that, at least in the App version of the Menu, I get a message suggesting that if I go any further into the Room Perfect Menu I risk deleting the existing Room Perfect calibration in favor of new data to be added with future measurements.

I do seem to recall that when I used Room Perfect on my old TDAI-2170 a few years ago, I did see a spec referring to Roomcorrection %. I have not seen that on either one of my current TDAI-3400 units. I am using software version 3.4.0 and before that used version 3.3.0.

In the App version of the Room Perfect set up menu, I do currently see the following message: "Room Perfect has data from 3 room measurements for a total room knowledge of 100%. You can improve the room knowledge by adding additional room measurements."

Obviously, once room knowledge reaches 100%, additional room measurements will not increase room knowledge. As I recall, Room Perfect actually automatically exited the program after I took one additional room measurement after it proclaimed I had reached 100% room knowledge.

You will recall that I "trick" Room Perfect into believing it quickly has 100% room knowledge by just not moving the measurement microphone from where it was initially as I make additional room measurements. See the description of this "trick" process in post #3 above. A few other people who hav tried this "trick" also report excellent results, better sounding than they had ever before achieved from using Room Perfect. In neither one of my Room Perfect set ups did it take more than three total measurements for Room Perfect to announce that 100% room knowledge had been achieved.

I suspect that this "trick" works well for systems where you only care about correcting the frequency response for a single "hot spot" or "sweet spot" listener, rather than for two or more listeners at distributed locations within the room. When I listen there is only one person in the room, me, and I always sit in the sweet spot, so I could care less about the sound quality elsewhere in the room. Still, however, as I mentioned in post #3 above, this Room Perfect "trick" does not seem to degrade sound quality elsewhere in the room in any way inferior to what the Room Perfect Bypass modes sounds like in that position.

I will add that now having two different TDAI-3400 units correcting two different speakers in two different rooms, subjectively the differences between the Focus and Bypass modes are greater with my Watkins Generation 4 speakers in my "larger" room than with my AR-303a speakers in my smaller-yet blue room. The AR-303a corrections seem quite subtle on A/B comparison of the Focus and Bypass modes, whereas the Watkins corrections are immediately rather obvious. The AR-303a corrections seem significant only upon longer-term listening. Whether this subjective impression of the degree of change between Focus and Bypass modes of Room Perfect correlates well with the Roomcorrection % you see reported by the program is unknown.

 

[tmallin]

Orange55, Right You Are!! Amazing!!

Forget Tidal Connect and MConnect.

It took me no more than three seconds listening to a familiar streamed recording via JPLAY (Steve Martin/Edie Brickell "So Familiar" title cut) to know that this was a substantial sonic improvement over any other way I've heard this via my Watkins-based system. I really can't believe the improvement!

Is it worth the $50 per year subscription fee? Absolutely!! Run, do not walk, to the App Store and install this. You likely have never heard streaming music with this quality. It automatically played first time without a hitch through the UPnP input of the Lyngdorf TDAI-3400.

EDIT: Sorry, but I was far too enthusiastic about JPLAY when I first tried it yesterday. Yes, it sounds fine, at least as good as Roon playing Qobuz and Tidal. It also has an excellent GUI with lots of control features and information about what's playing on Qobuz and Tidal. But at least with my 3400, the Live Radio function is quite unstable--not nearly up to the radio functions of Roon, Lumin, TuneIn, vTuner, airable, etc.

So many things were happening yesterday around my house that I confused one audio change with another.

In the morning I had just discovered that my listening chair in the Watkins room had moved further from the speakers than it originally was when I had run Room Perfect. I then moved my chair in the Watkins system forward an inch, back into the position it was in when I ran Room Perfect months ago. The chair had apparently slipped backward an inch over time from getting in and out of it so much despite being careful about that. I measure the chair position, and thus my listening position, from the pinhead firmly stuck in the chair back to a piece of tape centered on the wall behind the speakers with my laser distance meter. That chair repositioning did cause a sonic change.

Then later in the day I installed JPLAY and heard what I thought was the JPLAY change as a big improvement on that one cut. But now that I've had a bit more experience with JPLAY, it was primarily the repositioning of the chair effects I'm hearing.

Acoustics--including speakers and physical system set up (speaker and listening position, as well as acoustic treatments) trumps everything else in terms of magnitude of subjective sonic quality changes. I mistakenly forgot about the acoustic change I had made before I evaluated JPLAY's sonics. Someone has said that moving speakers a fraction of an inch produces more sonic difference than the difference between any two amps. Believe it.

Just goes to show me: consider well before trumpeting huge improvements from new ways of manipulating zeros and ones.

 

[tmallin]

Here is a link to the JPLAY review by Audiophile Style/The Computer Audiophile. Whether there are sonic improvements is ignored/downplayed/fudged there in both the review and in the comments to the review. What is clear, however, is that the GUI is nice and a lot of information about recordings is provided if you know where to look--see the comments. One way to see some of the information displayed about a selected album (I don't think this is mentioned in the review) is to touch the icon near the bottom right of the screen which is made up of an arrow, horizontal lines, and a number.

https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/reviews/jplay-for-ios-and-ipados-review-r1213/

I also note about JPLAY that its built-in volume control is much better than the ones in MConnect and Tidal Connect. It's still not as exact as the volume controls in Roon and the Lyngdorf App, but fine enough. The JPLAY volume control in my system seems to cross the Lyngdorf/Roon volume indication at 50; the volume numbers are different above and below JPLAY 50.

As to my chair movement, the upholstered skirt on my chair hid the fact that the chair had moved with respect to the carpet. Also, I had failed to mark the carpet with tape so I could see the backward movement. Now that I know the chair tends to move backward and not forward, I've put masking tape at the front of the back legs to mark where they should be so I can check for movement by lifting the skirt, bypassing the need to check with the laser measuring device.

 

[tmallin]

Finding the URL of an internet radio station used to be easy, but as streaming technology has evolved, the URL identity of a radio stream is more and more often "hidden" from plain view. You need the URL to create a custom radio station in Roon's Live Radio if the station isn't already listed in Roon or, if it ever starts working reliably, JPLAY.

I finally discovered a way to get the URL which seems to work most every time. I basically simplified some instructions I found in an online video and translated them into what I think is fairly clear text:

1. Right click anywhere on the home page of the radio station you want to listen to. By "home page" I mean the page which has a Listen button on it.

2.From the small menu which then appears, click on the last selection, Inspect

3. From the window which opens on the right side of the screen, click on the Network header; you may have to expand this window to the left to see the Network header

4. On the home page of the station, click on the Listen button or otherwise start up the radio station's live stream

5. Now in the right window, the Name field should be open with the name of the stream listed.

6. Click on the name of the stream. Now the Headers header will be highlighted and the first line under that header should read "Request URL"

7. The URL of the stream appears to the right of the "Request URL:" Highlight and select the URL. That is the URL of the stream. You can paste that into the URL bar of a new browser window to test it. The station should either play immediately or play when you click the play arrow.