Roon Clock Master Priority Settings
Hi all,
I am just coming from a lenghty listening session in the Taiko Audio reference room (what a great way to start your week) and would like to report some findings that I made – they are very convenient to try at home, since you can perform the changes right from your seat in a matter of seconds.
The Clock Master Priority settings in Roon are accessible via the following steps:
Volume icon bottom right --> Gears icon --> Device Setup --> Show Advanced
You will find a range from 1 (Highest) to 10 (Lowest), as well as Default.
A look in the Roon Knowledge Base explains what it does:
“Since MQA authorization by an MQA device requires MQA signaling information to complete the decoding and rendering processes, in certain cases grouped zone playback may interfere with MQA devices’ abilities to authenticate and decode the stream.
If you’d like your MQA device to be able to authenticate and decode an MQA stream while playing in a grouped zone, you should set its “Clock Master Priority” setting to the highest in the group.”
Interestingly, although we do not use Zone Grouping, the chosen settings seem to have a slight but consistent effect on the resulting sound. We have no explanation yet why this would affect non-MQA non-grouped playback, but you can easily try this at home and report if you hear a difference. We do not believe you can measure that effect with any tool known to us.
All findings solely within the context of our reference system, I want to start with the extremes that will show you the two polar sides between you can move:
1 – Shifts focus on the upper frequency spectrum (“top down”), harsh and shrill highs compared to all other settings, very taught timing and focus resulting in a mechanical feeling of the rendition, lower color intensity, little bloom and dimensionality, a sound I associate with badly made silver cables, not good match to our system.
10 – Shifts focus on the lower frequency spectrum (“bottom up”), sluggish, slow and loose sounding relative to all other settings, very bloomy, less control and focus, “sleepy” feeling resulting in quickly lost attention. Maybe similar to underdamped ported bass speakers in too small a room, also no good match.
You can probably already imagine, that somewhere between those extremes there might be a sweet spot depending on your tastes and of course your system. You can have basically all shades there are in between.
For me in our system the fun began between settings 3 and 8.
While at first I was enamoured with 3 as being very incisive, quick, “alive”, toe-tapping and open without the harshness of 1, the more I listened I tended to choose higher and higher numbers, effectively landing at 7 for a more sonorous, more dimensional sound, more suited to the solid state gear that we have. In another system that needs a little life injected, I might as well have chosen 4.
The beauty is that it is a very nice tool to slightly bring your sound closer to what you like – for free!
The last option that I did not mention would be “Default”, which I believe is either 1, 2 or 3.
If you want to try that at home, I suggest you start with the extremes like I did and then slowly find your sweet spot. I would be happy if you would share your favorite settings (and of course please also share should you not hear a difference, this would also be valuable data points).
Very curious for your feedback, have fun testing!
Christoph