 The HB project and the HB channel are supported by AudioQuest. Experience the difference. It was already announced, Rune 1.3 would be their biggest update ever. And it sure is. Rune was a music streaming sensation of 2016. Present in many booths on every Hi-Fi show and already supported by tens of hardware companies that see a happy marriage between their specialism being hardware and the best software coming from Rune. Version 1.3 brings the software even to a higher level. The list of improvements is enormous and I don't have the illusion I have found them all. But let's start with the user interface. In the top right corner there now is not only a magnifying glass for searching the database but also a funnel. With a magnifying glass you just search the database using the funnel you activate the focus function. In the previous version you needed to first open the focus window to enter the search string. Now you can enter a search string immediately and, if necessary, consequently open the focus window for further tweaking of your query. The improvements to your user interface are numerous, like the spreadsheet-like tracks browser that lets you select and sort on any column and is blazing fast. The same goes for the works screen that is now renamed to a more appropriate composition screen. In the track listing of an album you can see immediately how many versions of that composition you'll have and how many there are on title, provided you have a title subscription of course. Click on one of these icons and that brings you to a screen that lets you play these compositions. You could already have more than one album art included, like the front and the back of a sleeve but if you want to see the PDF that came with the download you bought you had to go to the file browser. Not anymore, the user interface is updated so that you now can see how many cover art pictures there are. Clicking on that icon will show them. But also the presence of a PDF is now visible and clicking that will open the PDF in a PDF reader. Roon now analyzes your tracks for not only loudness but also dynamic range. Loudness is used for automatic leveling of tracks when this function is switched on for that endpoint. The nice thing of Roon is that it can control the volume knob of a Roon-ready endpoint so if you own an endpoint that has an analog or well designed digital volume control it can be adjusted to compensate for loudness differences without sacrificing the audio quality. The dynamic range indicates the amount of level compression, not to confuse with file compression, that has been applied. If you have several versions of the same album the other versions button shows those versions including the number of tracks, the location of the file as usual but also the dynamic range, sampling rate and bid depth. The dynamic range can also be made visible in the cover art on the albums detail screen, in the tracks browser when the dynamic range column is enabled and in the file info pop-up. Both loudness and dynamic range are measured using the recent ARC 128 standard. Although Roon does not yet offer MQA decoding it is perfectly able to play MQA files to an MQA DAC. If you have a title hi-fi subscription it will also play those effortless. You can now couple about any criteria into a tag like albums, tracks, artists, genres, composers and compositions and playlists. This way you can make collections based on any rational or even irrational criteria. Want to know what you bought from highresaudio.com? No problem. Want to group all music you own in both 2496 and MQA? Simple. Want to join all the work of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, both together and individually? Easy. And it's now very easy to access all since there is a tag browser. Furthermore, tags can be investigated by using the focus function. So, what's the difference between a playlist and a bookmark? Well, playlists hold a defined list of tracks and bookmarks a number of focus criteria as where the tags can be made of fixed selections as in playlist and selection criteria as in focus. So it's bookmarks and playlists combined. Apart from that you can link tags to a user or to all the users. A frequently requested addition is that of an automatic backup of the Roon database. That not only contains the Roon metadata but also the edits, play history, configuration details, preferences and so on. You can plan automatic backups to your computer or Nash but also to Dropbox provided you have an account. Testing the backup function made clear that backing up to a Dropbox obviously took considerable time so it's advisable to first make a local backup and then make the Dropbox backup. And there is no harm in having two backups anyway. Please do realize that it only backs up the Roon files and not the music files. A very clever move is the addition to use Sonos devices as playback devices. The Sonos protocol and the Sonos hardware have their limitations like the 48 kHz sampling limit but where necessary Roon will automatically downsample to 44.1 or 48 kHz. Word has it that they are looking at heroes control as well and it's not likely to stop there. To summarize they now support Sulus, Airplane, Squeezebox and Sonos next to their rather advanced and already widely supported RAD protocol as used for the Roon Ready devices. The zones menu has been adapted too. For each endpoint there are now menu options to transfer the music playing to another zone, to group endpoints into zones, to change settings like crossfade and volume leveling, devices setting and DSP options. It all has become more transparent especially for fleas like me that have far more endpoints than Rooms. Let's have a look at the options you can set for each endpoint separately. When using DSP, digital signal processing functions, chances are that you output a higher level than 0 dBFS, 100% modulation and thus cause clipping. Therefore the DSP function offers the possibility to lower the gain prior to filtering. A clipping indicator is also provided, the signal part light turns red then. One of the DSP functions is upsampling. Depending on who you speak, upsampling is judged as very beneficiary to the sound or snake oil, as often the truth is somewhere in between. When you upsample in Roon or any other computer player, you replace the upsampling that most DACs also do but then with a process that is far more powerful than the one in the DAC. The DAC now only has to filter out the very high sampling frequency in the analog domain using a Gentile filter. This often leads to clear improvements in sound. But there are exceptions too. If the DAC does have very high quality upsampling internally, usually programmed into FPGAs, that might lead to similar or even better results. The easiest way to find out is simply to try. Please do bear in mind that upsampling, especially to DSD, does require a lot of number crunching. Make sure your computer can handle the load, otherwise the cure might be a bigger problem. The parametric equalizer is a very powerful tool. It knows peak dip, high shelf, low shelf, low pass, high pass, band pass and band stop filtering. Depending on the type of filter, other settings are offered. To demonstrate this, I made a profile with all these types, a very unlikely setup by the way. The peak dip filter knows a center frequency, a gain and a Q factor. That Q factor defines the width of the filter relative to the frequency. This filter can be used to filter out a single problem frequency. The easiest way to set the center frequency is to provide a small gain and a high Q and then vary the frequency until you hear clear peaking. Then attenuate that frequency and vary the Q for the optimal result. Make sure the volume is set low to prevent speaker damage. The high shelf filter varies the level above a given frequency, like the low shelf filter varies the level below a given frequency. Again, frequency, gain and Q can be set. The low and the high pass filters might be confused with the shelf filters, but they give a roll-off below or above a given frequency. Therefore, only the frequency and the slope in dB per octave can be set. In this graph you see in pink the high shelf in yellow the low pass and in white the cumulative result. Both filters are set to 6 kHz. The band pass filter only allows a small part of the spectrum to pass and only the frequency and the Q factor can be set. The band stop filter is more or less the opposite of the band pass filter and neither are used frequently. Whatever you do, never exceed the computational power of the computer the chord is running on. It has to do all the computing for all the zones, so after you set the preferences check whether that computer still has air to breathe. Furthermore, use EQs like you use salt, with modulation or not at all. Always look for solutions that use attenuation of frequencies rather than a boost. That leaves the speaker setup in the DSP function. Here you can compensate for differences in distance between you and the two loudspeakers, both in time and in gain. You can also invert the phase of one or more speakers. Yes, more speakers for its seems rune can also play back multi-channel now, although I didn't try it since I don't have multi-channel music. For headphone listeners there also is a cross-setting according to the Bauer stereo to binaural algorithms. And further you can tell the world what you're playing and what you like about it. Facebook and Twitter are the direct choices. Rune also claims to have further improved the speed. Something I can't confirm nor deny since I had just moved the Rune Core from the recent iMac 5 to an Intel i3 NUC running Linux Mint. But speed is no problem, especially if you, like me, don't use the DSP functions. Rune has conquered the audio world at top speed. Many audio manufacturers had to settle for the DLLA protocol that was started in 2003 by the big electronic companies. Developing their own more advanced and up-to-date protocol simply is very costly and can only be done if you aim at the low rent of the market to make volume, like Sonos does. It therefore isn't surprising that many open market audio manufacturers are keen to support Rune since it takes away their problem of writing software that has to be earned back on relatively low numbers of equipment. What makes Rune so special for the user? That's hard to explain until you start using it. I have seen it with colleagues and distributors that said to me they didn't see the need for Rune until they tried it. In this video I described many great features and I love them all. But the essence of Rune lies somewhere else. It is the blazing fast, super-intuitive user interface offering loads of information. Another good point is the separation of heavy database and DSP work in the computer the Rune core is running on. And the lighter than light work the endpoint has to perform. That endpoint might be a Rune-ready DAC or a networked audio adapter like the Sonora MicroRendu, the SOTM-SMS-200 or just a simple Raspberry Pi. I promise you to make a video to further explain this. So if you want to stay informed, subscribe to this channel or follow me on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. If you have a question, please post it below this video, but please don't ask me for buying advice. See my About Questions video to find out why. You'll find more information below this video. If you liked this video, please consider supporting the channel through Patreon, see the link in the show notes. And don't forget you have to tell your friends on the web about it. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHPproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.