Separating from the house ground and having no measurable ground noise currents between components is excellent. The bass fidelity may be partly owing to low harmonic distortion. (The AC frequency in the US is most often 60Hz. What is it in Dubai?)
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Here in Blumenau I have a voltage that I consider very good for audio.
220v single phase at 60Hz.
The voltage in audio devices is independent, coming directly from the power panel with grounding.
All my devices work on 220v
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I reserved one of the three phases 230V in Germany for my audio set-up.
One AWG5 cable goes into a hard-wired distribution box, from there AWG11 to the devices, the connectors are Neutrik Powercon 32A. All fuses inside the devices are removed. This was the best audio investment by far. I never looked back.
Matt
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Hi. We have 50Hz here in Dubai. I guess most countries are 50 Hz as well.
I was wondering if a higher frequency is better or not. Interesting to know commercial aircraft use 115V 400Hz for their internal equipment.
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Yes. I guess this will give you a more stable and clearer sign wave. But you may have issues as the ground and neutral are still shared.
It is interesting how every power configuration impacts the sound. You can do anything, but never give money to power cable scammers. Buy quality cables for power but do not get scammed.
Do some AB testing and accordingly select. Not sure if your DAC provides such high resolution, as that is an important element.
Roon use experience is good. I like one aspect that I hope comes to AS. The cross-integration among Qobuz and Tidal. For example, you open an artist and see the albums on both service providers. Roon assets are the meta data.
Since, to me, sound quality comes first. I will stick with AS.
It doesn’t make sense to me to have both, so this feature is not important for me at all, but YMMV.
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There are album variations on each service. But I agree it is not worth paying for both. I will cancel Tidal.
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From my POV, Audirvana ticks more boxes than Roon. What Roon has is the UI, it’s more fluid, it doesn’t freeze randomly and transitioning from one page to another is almost instant.
But for me, Audirvana has some nice features Tidal related (for e.g. seeing my Favorites from Tidal in one place, and editing works both ways, because I use my phone also with Tidal and I want to have them working both on PC with Audirvana and directly in Tidal with my phone), and also the Frequency Response feature, along with the music quality.
Also, up until now, Roon is not capable of playing Tidal’s FLACs, only MQAs (but Audirvana is seeing them both, which is very nice).
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I have tried both Roon + HQ Player and AS + Hang Loose Convolver and AS hands down is the SQ winner IMO. The best way I can describe it is that Roon sounds veiled. Roon wins on interface, and consistency in playback (I get some stalling and track skips occasionally using AS). I was using the same laptop and RPi as a bridge to Benchmark DAC3-L, AHB2 and Revel F226Bes comparing the two. I think what is best really depends what you are looking for (ease of use, application, system capability etc.) I am on the SQ side so sticking with AS. Also as a random note using REW and rephase to make convolution files for FR and Phase correction provided amazing results - highly recommended - YMMV.
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For me - I don’t have the electronics and experience of the others on this thread - but I dropped an Audiolab DC Block onto the connection between my wall power socket and my equipment and it is probably the biggest tweak I have heard that allows for what to me sounds like better instrument separation a wider soundstage and as one of the other posters remarked being able to go loud or quiet while retaining the separation soundstage and balance across the treble mid and bass ranges. It took some getting used to initially as instinctively ‘cleaning up’ / ‘isolating’ the power source doesn’t feel like it would be much of a thing - but it has been for me
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Hi @bladeraptor
Are you talking about one of these, as they do look like a potentially interesting upgrade that doesn’t cost the earth or involve ripping out the existing wiring from your dwelling 
Cheers 
Blocking DC does not entail isolation… it is a physical filter… Apparently, you have some appliances, and other electric devices like dimmers that are injecting DC offset distortion on the mains power feeding your amplifier(s).
If you ever want to go further at some point in the future, this is a snippet from a Wikipedia article on electrical leakage:
“When mains filters are used in the power circuits supplying an electrical or electronic assembly, e.g., …an AC/DC power converter, leakage currents will flow through the ‘Y’ capacitors that are connected between the live and neutral conductors to the earthing or grounding conductor. The current that flows through these capacitors is due to the capacitors’ impedance at power line frequencies…. In some applications, e.g. medical devices with patient contact, the acceptable amount of leakage current can be quite low, less than 10 mA.”
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Yup I plan to get the Blocking 6 once finances allow - I have the single DC block at the moment
I live in a block of flats with electrics dating back to the Victorian period - some upgrades have been made - but in some cases its shared rings where flats have been sub divided and so its not just my devices etc. on the ring - its potentially all sort of disruptive elements like hair dryers and other consumer goods creating ‘noise’ or ‘dirt’ or however you want to term it coming out of the wall sockets
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I kind of hesitate to post this comment, because the “tweak” I describe violates one of my rules (don’t spend money on a tweak to something inexpensive when you can spend it on better quality components), and though I have a plausible reason for the subjective improvement I hear, I have no measurements to back it up. But I really do like the results a lot, so here goes anyway. 
As described in another thread, I have an optical USB cable that doesn’t transmit power from one end to the other, so it needs a power supply to inject power at the receiving end. Also, I have an iFi NEO iDSD DAC, and a friend I trust says iFi’s switching power supplies can be sources of leakage current (see my post above in this thread from a couple of days ago). The friend had suggested a Teddy Pardo linear power supply as a possibility for the optical USB cable, and so I got to thinking it might make a nice replacement for the DAC’s power supply as well.
Long story short, I wound up ordering two “mini-Teddy” power supplies from Teddy Pardo and hooking them up to my USB cable and DAC. I was thinking there might be a small improvement, but what I got, subjectively, was a considerably greater improvement than I expected. Of course, I don’t claim to have golden ears and am as subject to bias as anyone else, so my impressions should be taken with a whole shaker full of salt. What I think I’m hearing is more clarity, bigger soundstage, better transients, lovely timbre from a system I enjoyed a great deal before and am enjoying more now.
The two mini-Teddy supplies varied a bit in price, because the one for the DAC had the usual barrel terminated cable, while the one for the optical USB cable needed a mini-USB termination. The two together, minus shipping, were a little less than $800 US, for an average of just under $400 each.
This means my USB connection, at $200 for the optical cable and ~$400 for the power supply, costs $600, which seems a bit ridiculous even to me. And IIRC the DAC was about $800, so the power supply costs half as much as the DAC itself. And yet, and yet - wow, I sure am enjoying the music: all the stuff you’re probably familiar with from your own experience, smiling face, tapping feet, searching out all sorts of albums and tracks from the collection to hear how they sound through the system now…
I suppose the two main points are that (1) for $800 (perhaps small change to some, perhaps not to others) I’m getting more enjoyment from my system, and (2) it might be worthwhile to pay close attention to power supplies for various system components, the DAC in particular.
Edit: Oh, the plausible reason for the subjective improvement - the Teddy power supplies put out very little leakage current (and are very low noise in other respects as far as I know).
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I exchanged it as soon as the iFi NEO iDSD DAC arrived for the iFi ipower elite, and I thought there was a considerable improvement.
Switching to better power supplies helps with sound quality.
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Hi Jud,
please can you provide a link to it, I mean the USB cable not the PS.
Thx