SlowJazzHand

Really enjoyed that. Cheers!

I agree, I'd rather go without room correction DSP myself, but that requires a large enough listening room where you can position the speakers exactly where you want/need them, where the speakers, not the room, provide most of the character of the sound and you can treat the room as required without aesthetic considerations. In smaller spaces where choice of speaker placement is limited and unabsorbed first reflections play a large part in determining sound quality, room correction software like Dirac becomes indispensable, at least in my case. As esldude mentioned, my next upgrade will be speakers.

In my case, this was a quantum improvement, especially Dirac. Everything else I have tried/tweaked was negligible by comparison.

I'm using ROON with Amarra sQ and Dirac Live right now. I have the Dirac Audio Processor as the default output device in Sound settings. In ROON's Audio settings, I have to use System Output, not SonicStream. Using these settings, Amarra sQ accepts ROON as input and outputs to your default audio device. I don't generally use this setup, though. I prefer the sound of ROON direct to Dirac Live in exclusive mode using tweaked Dirac target response curves as EQ.

I use stand-alone Dirac and the latest build of Roon (16) is fully compatible with it. It's been a day and no problems whatsoever, everything sounds great.

They discuss the delay of new albums in Tidal showing up in Roon in this thread from the Roon support forums: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/tidal-tracks-wont-import/1612

My experience with the NovaPre is the same as yours, regardless of source (PC/Mac), the USB input would always snap, crackle, and pop, and sometimes not be detected by the computer. I could never get it to work properly. Using a usb/spdif converter provided better sound anyway. I isolated the problem by connecting the same setup to another usb dac and connecting to the NovaPre's AUX input. No problems at all.

I only get that if TIDAL streams a lossy version. No conversions are being applied to my local AAC files.