Native 5.1 and Atmos music is going to be a big part of streaming going forward and while it is still somewhat in its infancy there are already titles available to stream if you have compatible equipment. Until recently I hadn’t really paid it much attention, spending 99% of my time on vinyl playback, but a customer request recently set me on a journey to enable playback for him, so I thought I’d write the process into a quick blog post.

This post specifically relates to 5.1 Qobuz music.

With the Altitude as the audio processor, very little actually needs to be done with this in terms of its setup. One main thing though is obviously you need to have a surround profile as the speaker layout (5.1 or above) and the decoder on the Roon input initially needs to be set to accept a native audio input. This gives you the ability to monitor correctly if the 5.1 signal is coming into the Trinnov in the processor section of the Altitude menus.

Most of the set-up for this is in the Roon platform. I will detail the steps below.

1. Turn on the Trinnov Altitude and let it fully boot up which will take around 1 minute.

2. Open Roon, this is best done on a Desktop PC or MAC initially.

3. The Altitude needs to be an enabled end point. To do this go to, Settings, Audio.

4. Look for the Trinnov Altitude in the list and enable it with the ENABLE button.

5. Once Enabled on the right-hand side, there is a small cog wheel which enables you to go into the Roon settings for the Trinnov Altitude, click on it, then click Device Setup.

6. This will open another window; you then need to click on the tab which says, “Show advanced”.

7. A longer list will then appear with the settings we need to adjust.

8. When configuring an endpoint, I’ve found that it’s best to be honest about its capabilities. Since the AL16 DACs don’t support MQA, choose “No MQA Support”.

9. You then need to select your sample rates and bit depth, for the Altitude16 this can be set to the highest level with is 96khz and 24bit. The recent software update on the AL16 allows down sampling for most unsupported formats. While we would usually aim for native playback, some sound is better than none in this case.

10. We would like Roon to unfold our MQA encoded content. So, we need to Enable our MQA core decoder. This isn’t related to what we are doing to enable 5.0/5.1 content but is best changed while we are in here.

11. Channel layout is best picked from the bed layer speakers, so if you use 7.1 or 5.1 select the correct one for you.

12. As we are looking to stream core native content, I would leave the Send Stereo/Mono content as 5/7.1 off. The Altitude will be far better at up mixing content if you require it to do so.

13. The next setting is “Swap rear and surround channels”. This only relates to those who selected 7.1 in the previous menus. I would suggest turning this on. From my tests I’ve found that all the 5.1 or 5.0 content currently available plays out of the surround back speakers rather than the surrounds which is where it should be. Toggling this switch pops them back into position. I am yet to find any 7.1 content to see if this is fed correctly into the bed layer. If anyone finds any feel free to let me know.

14. The final setting is a down mixer, so as we want 5.0 or 5.1 this should be set to off, channel mapping only.

Once you are done with all these settings hit save and go back to the home screen. In theory you are now ready to stream. Qobuz currently are the only streaming service to support 5.0/5.1 in any quantity or quality for the Altitude. Tidal while displaying Atmos titles, don’t support it through Roon, this may well change in the future.

The best thing to do to find content, is to search for “5.1” or “Edition 5.1” in the search bar for Qobuz, within Roon. Content currently is still very limited, but I expect this to grow in the coming years. Whilst these albums are not really to my taste, they do sound fantastic and give a snippet of what is possible into the world of music in a multi-channel delivery system.

While the settings above are directly related to a Trinnov Altitude, I have also tested the playback on a NAD T778. The settings were not as detailed in Roon for this device, but it seemed to pass the multi-channel audio correctly. So, if you are using Roon as a direct end point with another receiver or processor, it may well be worth trying. If you have more than 7.1 or 5.1 and want to up mix to your 16 or 24 channels, you can do this with an up mixer in the Altitude as normal, from my tests I had really good results with Auro 3D as it seems to favour the stereo L&R channels rather than the centre.

If you need help with this or any aspect of your Trinnov system, feel free to drop us and email and get in touch. We are the oldest Trinnov authorised installers in the county and have the most units in the field. We would be happy to hear from you.