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Article: Roon Vs. JRiver | Clash of the Titans


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3 hours ago, hvbias said:

 

If I am understanding this correctly these are locally stored tags in Roon and not written to the files?

 

How would it handle box sets that are a compilation by artist or say conductor? Would you be able to have the name of the box set as well as the name of the original LP era album come up properly in Roon and searchable?

 

You are correct. This moderator post on the Roon Community site explains:

 

“Roon does not add any information to your base files. So any updates, edits, etc made in Roon stay in Roon. This is by design. Many people, myself included, perfect the files metadata before putting it into Roon. Basically, if I download a file or Rip a CD, I do so to a staging area. I then review the metadata, make changes if wanted or necessary, and then move it to the Roon watched folders.”

 

You can add group tags, which would let you delineate boxed sets. You can add comment tags to files that will identify the source. You can even add “hidden” tags that are only searchable and visible for you.  The only limitation is your imagination.  All such tags are usable in Roon but are not included in file metadata, so they’re invisible to other players like JRMC.

 

It works great for me.

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Roon and JRiver Media Center are both excellent software packages that let computer audiophiles enjoy the highest quality music playback their systems will reproduce.  

 

I can't agree with the above statement given the availability of HQPlayer which, with appropriate upsampling and filter settings, can and will produce higher quality music playback than either Roon or JRiver. The latter music players can provide high quality playback, but not the highest.

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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On 1/22/2019 at 3:17 PM, Allan F said:

 

I can't agree with the above statement given the availability of HQPlayer which, with appropriate upsampling and filter settings, can and will produce higher quality music playback than either Roon or JRiver. The latter music players can provide high quality playback, but not the highest.

 

Hi, Allan!

 

I haven’t compared them in my own home and systems, so I can’t comment from my own experience. But there are a lot of very long threads on web forums with raging debates among those who prefer HQP, those who prefer JRMC, those who use HQP with Roon, and assorted others. I’ve found no clear consensus.  There are enough supporters of each platform to suggest to me that differences are purely subjective. I’m very glad that you’ve found your preference and thank you for your input. You make me want to try HQP (which I will now do).

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16 hours ago, bluesman said:

 

Hi, Allan!

 

I haven’t compared them in my own home and systems, so I can’t comment from my own experience. But there are a lot of very long threads on web forums with raging debates among those who prefer HQP, those who prefer JRMC, those who use HQP with Roon, and assorted others. I’ve found no clear consensus.  There are enough supporters of each platform to suggest to me that differences are purely subjective. I’m very glad that you’ve found your preference and thank you for your input. You make me want to try HQP (which I will now do).

 

I can only recall seeing preferences of Roon or JRMC over HQP because of HQP's rudimentary user interface or computing demands, and not with respect to the primary issue of sound quality. However, the proof is in the pudding and you should give HQP a try, taking advantage of its excellent filtering and resampling capabilities.

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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On 1/26/2019 at 3:17 PM, Allan F said:

 

I can only recall seeing preferences of Roon or JRMC over HQP because of HQP's rudimentary user interface or computing demands, and not with respect to the primary issue of sound quality.

 

Here's a typical thread on this (found on the Roon community site) with the following quotes reflecting what seems like a consensus:

 

  • "I just can’t detect a lot of difference between Roon DSP and HQP." [from David Orgel]
  • "For me its now a case of sounding different rather than better." [from Audiogeek]
  • "...issue with DSD256, sometimes constant dropouts with HQP and no issues at all with Roon." [from Mystic]
  • "HQPlayer Poly-sinc DSD7 sounds so similar to linear DSD7 in Roon" [from Jeff (Dr Tone)]

 

Others favor HQP for SQ, but reports of gross differences are few and far between.  Most HQP enthusiasts describe small and subjective differences they find preferable. As I'm in the middle of a large review for an upcoming article, I won't have time to try HQP until I finish up.  My DACs are not up to serious DSD, so I'll have to buy a new one - but I'll get back to this as soon as I can.

 

It may be freezing outside, but I've got my tubes to keep me warm :) 

 

vacum_tubes_cropped.jpg.c60660353b6fd3410141fb5e1612c79d.jpg

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17 minutes ago, bluesman said:

 

Here's a typical thread on this (found on the Roon community site) with the following quotes reflecting what seems like a consensus:

  • "I just can’t detect a lot of difference between Roon DSP and HQP." [from David Orgel]
  • "For me its now a case of sounding different rather than better." [from Audiogeek]
  • "...issue with DSD256, sometimes constant dropouts with HQP and no issues at all with Roon." [from Mystic]
  • "HQPlayer Poly-sinc DSD7 sounds so similar to linear DSD7 in Roon" [from Jeff (Dr Tone)]

 

It may be freezing outside, but I've got my tubes to keep me warm :)

 

Not unexpected from the Roon community. :)

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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29 minutes ago, bluesman said:

But all of them are using HQP with Roon, so they have no vested interest in the superiority of either one.

 

They have a significant financial investment in Roon. Obviously, if one believes that there is no sonic benefit to HQP, there is no reason to use it with Roon. Typically, HQP users who subscribe to Roon have done so for Roon's interface and database. If one does not subscribe to a streaming service, I find it difficult to justify the cost of Roon for that purpose, given the availability of free alternative HQP interfaces such as HQPDcontrol, which consumes far less resources as it resides solely on a tablet or phone. To each his own.

 

With the Arctic front about to cover 75% of the US, those warm tubes will be a blessing if you live within that area. :)

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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37 minutes ago, Allan F said:

 

They have a significant financial investment in Roon.

 

With the Arctic front about to cover 75% of the US, those warm tubes will be a blessing if you live within that area. :)

 

I thought HQP is $150 on top of the cost of Roon.  If it were free, I'd add it on the spot just to have it.  But the best way to fight the "feeling like a fool for having spent the extra money for no reason" factor (née "buyers' remorse") is to use it anyway.

 

Yes, I'm in that area - and it's beginning to feel a lot like winter! Fortunately, spring is just around the corner.......

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3 hours ago, bluesman said:

 

I thought HQP is $150 on top of the cost of Roon.  If it were free, I'd add it on the spot just to have it.  But the best way to fight the "feeling like a fool for having spent the extra money for no reason" factor (née "buyers' remorse") is to use it anyway.

 

Yes, I'm in that area - and it's beginning to feel a lot like winter! Fortunately, spring is just around the corner.......

 

HQPDcontrol is free. HQP is not. However, it doesn't make much sense to "use it anyway" if it doesn't sound better and demands more of your music server's resources. "Buyers' remorse" is hardly a justification, and I highly doubt that there are many using the combination of HQP and Roon who don't believe that it produces better sound. Having said that, it is my understanding that more recent versions of Roon have significantly reduced the gap in SQ between the two.

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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36 minutes ago, Allan F said:

 

HQPDcontrol is free. HQP is not. However, it doesn't make much sense to "use it anyway" if it doesn't sound better and demands more of your music server's resources. "Buyers' remorse" is hardly a justification, and I highly doubt that there are many using the combination of HQP and Roon who don't believe that it produces better sound. Having said that, it is my understanding that more recent versions of Roon have significantly reduced the gap in SQ between the two.

 

First, I didn't know that HQPDcontrol was a player.  I thought it was a remote control app for the $150 HQ Player Desktop app - and after re-reading the entire website, I still do.  What am I missing?

 

Second, you either have a limited circle of friends or an unusual one.  Buyer's remorse is a common driver of behavior that's otherwise inexplicable, especially to the spouse or SO of the remorseful............"It's really great, honey! Thanks for understanding how much I wanted to buy this!" has it all over "I'm sorry I wasted the money on this, dear. It's no better than Roon, but at least it's cheaper than that RF-reducing curtain rod I spent $500 on last month." :)  

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33 minutes ago, bluesman said:

 

First, I didn't know that HQPDcontrol was a player.  I thought it was a remote control app for the $150 HQ Player Desktop app - and after re-reading the entire website, I still do.  What am I missing?

 

HQPEcontrol is an Android app for tablet or phone to remotely control HQP. It is not a player, but it provides a user friendly interface that allows music selection by artist, album and genre. I actually prefer its album view to that of Roon. Many HQP users adopted Roon solely for its user friendly interface. I don't see any point in arguing over the effect of buyers remorse or whose circle of friends is limited or unusual. IMO, it varies by individual and It makes absolutely no sense to me to continue to use something that provides no benefit while having the negative effect of unnecessarily commanding resources. There are times when it is far better to simply admit you made a mistake, correct it, and move on. I suspect that just about every audiophile has, at one time or another, made a purchase that they regretted. But few people I know have stuck with it unless they could not afford to do otherwise. :)

"Relax, it's only hi-fi. There's never been a hi-fi emergency." - Roy Hall

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - William Bruce Cameron

 

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  • 9 months later...

I'd be interested if you have figured out a nice config to use both in combination to rip CDs or download Albums (from Tidal) and then 'copy" specific tracks or albums to your mobile phone (iPhone in my case). The goal is to have a nice multi-room player, ripper, and central storage for all music and base to use to copy select tracks or albums to mobile for travel purposes. Make sense?

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  • 3 months later...

As a long-time user of JRiver, there are some missing and misleading information in your comparison.

JRiver's licensing is actually a yearly subscription disguised as a perpetual license. You have to re-pay $50 at the end of every year to get the next year's release. 2019 was JRiver 25, 2020 is JRiver 26's year. So, say, if you purchased it at $70 last September and you if you wanted to update it to v26 this January, you had to pay another $50(discounted price). So you'd pay Roon's perpetual $500 for 9 years with JRiver, assuming that they won't change the price ever. 

Other issue is, support. Their "documents" mentioned in this article comprises of Wiki pages which are not updated for almost a decade now and they do not match the last 5-6 versions. Their only so-called support is their forum with many problems go unanswered. Almost all JWindows problems are deliberately connected to antivirus by the owner of JRiver and you can easily go and read their forum to see how problematic the simple installation and settings are recently. There are many threads recommending uninstalling your antivirus software to make it work as it is tamper-heavy through phoning home and other processes. If you have a comprehensive audio file archive you'd witness how many times importing process would crash for the simplest reasons. As I said, just go to its "support" forum and read the problems and the responses.

It has amazing functions for network (if you can tame your antivirus software) but do mind that you have to jump hoops to set it up to be able to be even playing a single audio file in the way that hundreds of other players do readily. I do not recommend it to anyone looking for a simple player and a capable library management software. But if you want to use it as it is meant to be, be ready to spend time with it almost as much as its developers do.

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  • 2 months later...

Long time since there was a post on this thread. 

 

I have been trying Roon despite my misgivings about its price because it can stream files converted to DSD256 on the fly, for which my two DACs (Topping D90 and W4S 10th Anniversary) are said to be optimized.  JRiver, which I have used for at least a decade, can do that locally over the host computer's USB using ASIO but it can't stream it over the network on DLNA. 

 

I have found that, even before file conversion, Roon sounds remarkably good in its RAAT native form.  The best way to describe it on my system is that the midrange and upper bass are more present and the high end is less prone to the brightness that I find fatiguing in many records with flutes, oboes, and high C trumpets. Converting the files and messing with the headroom management yields even better sound most of the time - presence is even more pronounced - but I also have found that it also sometimes compresses the music. Luckily, you can enable and disable the headroom and conversion capabilities on the fly.  

 

What I am coming to despise about Roon is the interface and inadequacy of the metadata. I own my music rather than get it from Tidal or Qobuz, so that's the context in which I offer these comments. 

 

I love that JRiver makes it so easy to edit metadata because I have some idiosyncratic tagging habits. (As an example, all of my seemingly thousands of Miles Davis and John Coltrane records have Miles Davis as both artist and album artist because I don't want to sort through separate "quartet," "quintet," "sextet," "+19," or similar listings when I am looking for something by "Miles Davis.") I also like to append "[24-44] or "[DSD]" where applicable to the title, often because I continue to keep Redbook versions of the same albums when they have bonus tracks that don't appear in the hi-res. 

 

Roon will allow me to override its metadata with my own as a default, but, even then, the displayed information on the Roon screen divides itself into "Miles Davis," "Miles Davis Quartet," "Miles Davis Quintet," etc.  Usually, this is due to tags, so I have to disable them manually.  At that point, Roon continues to display the now-empty "Quartet," "Quintet," etc., fields, cluttering up the screen. Also, before I learned to override the Roon-provided data with my own, it commingled the multiple versions of the albums.  JRiver also will if do that, if you don't give the albums unique names, but Roon did that even with unique names until I messed with the settings to prevent that. 

 

I like Roon's display of credits for albums, but, it is primitive.  I have a lot of independent and foreign jazz for which Roon has no metadata or credits at all.  For albums on which it does have credits, it does not provide track number references like those you'd find on an album cover, so there will be three pianists, two bassists, and two drummers just lumped together on lots of jazz albums.  Without Googling, I can't tell who's playing at the moment. If I still need to Google while listening, anyway, I don't enjoy paying a data access charge to Roon for information that is free on the web, especially since I have to be connected to the network, anyway, just to play music at all. 

 

I could go on, but these are the most significant reasons why I find Roon's interface unpleasant to use in my system, with my display preferences. So, for me, the question is whether it's worth $120 a year for the SQ improvements.  It may just be. (The $699 lifetime membership is a non-starter for me because I am 70 years old.)  

 

Whether or not I sign up for an annual Roon subscription, I will keep JRiver for both ease of metadata editing and for the few times I need to stream to a phone, tablet, or TV over DLNA. Contrary to what some folks on this thread suggest, it will cost you only about $20 for the annual upgrade and, as with Roon, in-version upgrades are free until the next version becomes available.  Even if support is terse, I appreciate JRiver's businesslike nature, ability to install on multiple server devices per platform, and flexibility. It is within a few percent of Roon on sound quality, as well, although it's seeking that last few percent that makes us audiophile loons. 

 

Your mileage may vary, of course. 

Living room:  Synology 218+ NAS > NUC 10 i7 > HQP Embedded > xfinity Xfi Router > Netgear GS348 Switch > Sonore Optical Module Deluxe > Sonore Signature Rendu SE Optical Tier 2 > Okto DAC 8 Stereo > Topping Pre90 Preamp > Apollon Audio 1ET400A Mini > Revel F32 Concertas

 

Computer Desk System: Synology DS-218+ NAS > Dell XPS 8930/NUC 10 i7  > HQP Desktop > xfinity Xfi Router > EtherRegen > ultraRendu > Topping D90 DAC > Audioengine A5+'s

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  • 7 months later...

A comment on multichannel (and before that, thanks for this outstanding and thoughtful comparison). I enjoy both Roon and JRMC thoroughly, and approach them both with great appreciation for all they do.

 

If you enjoy multichannel music obsessively, you'll find JRMC to be an essential tool. Bit-perfect multichannel is very challenging on Roon, and DSD-multichannel is pretty much impossible on Roon without accepting lots of conversion or investing thousands of dollars in computing (and even then there's no guarantee it will work). But bit-perfect multichannel and DSD multichannel is "straightforward" on JRMC. (I put straightforward in quotes because any experienced JRMC user knows nothing is that straightforward on JRMC - but I promise it works perfectly once you've configured it.) I've collected about 300 high-res digital files, and JRMC is the best way by far to play them through my set-up, which relies on an Oppo UDP-205 for DAC-duties. 

Apart from that, the Roon wins hands down for user experience. I haven't heard the sound differences described in this review, but that's probably a shortcoming of my ears. I love the SQ from both programs equally, and find that I go to Roon for stereo and JRiver for multichannel.

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13 hours ago, openmindaudio said:

I've collected about 300 high-res digital files, and JRMC is the best way by far to play them through my set-up,

I agree that JRMC is the best way to play HiRez MCH files.

 

13 hours ago, openmindaudio said:

Apart from that, the Roon wins hands down for user experience.

Here, I cannot agree but that's a personal decision.  I find it hard to find what I want from my own library with Roon because of search limitations and I find it frustrating to edit metadata with Roon.  Yes, my collection is mostly Classical and, when Roon gets the metadata right, it is a delight.  Too often, the recognition process is faulty and the parcellation and identification of works/tracks is corrupt.  Fixing it is daunting.

Kal Rubinson

Senior Contributing Editor, Stereophile

 

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Agree completely, Kal. 

 

For jazz and, especially, classical, Roon's user experience is vastly overrated. I routinely find erroneous album identification; lack of identification at all even when the album is in the database;  tons of albums without useful data in the database; and incredibly poor and inflexible handling of box sets or multi-composer albums. 

 

If you have ten versions of "Le Petit Soldat" or "Tzigane" or any non-US or independent jazz, your experience is going to be a lot worse than if your collection predominantly features Diana Krall or the Eagles. 

 

I *hate* that I can't associate a file extension with Roon so that I can play a newly-downloaded file without having to import it into the database first. 

 

I don't care for how Roon uses screen space, but, admittedly that is subjective.  

 

Add that the forums are filled with Thought Police who brook zero dissent about Roon's divinity and I feel like a voice in the wilderness when I express a contrary opinion there. 

 

All that said, I probably will renew my Roon subscription this summer.  I have time invested in edits even though I continue to do the bulk of my database management in JRiver.  I can create playlists in Roon by label without having to add a "label" field to my ten tons of music file metadata.  Much more importantly, I only stream and don't play over the control computer's USB ports, and RAAT is superb for that use case. Roon finds every device in my house, connects easily to each, and stays connected.

 

Of greatest significance to me, my DACs and ears like DSD256 playback.  JRiver can stream that natively but it can't upsample a network stream to DSD.  Audirvana can upsample a stream to DSD256, but it has quirks when it does and runs my CPU much hotter than does Roon.  Roon thus sounds better than JRiver and works more reliably than Audirvana in my systems when playing back as I prefer. 

 

If JRiver could stream everything as DSD256, I would just use it and be done with Roon and Audirvana. Its unwillingness or inability to engineer that capability, however, means I generally use Roon for playback because I like what is under its hood.  I don't prefer Roon's business model, but they have gotten me hooked to that extent. 

 

 

Living room:  Synology 218+ NAS > NUC 10 i7 > HQP Embedded > xfinity Xfi Router > Netgear GS348 Switch > Sonore Optical Module Deluxe > Sonore Signature Rendu SE Optical Tier 2 > Okto DAC 8 Stereo > Topping Pre90 Preamp > Apollon Audio 1ET400A Mini > Revel F32 Concertas

 

Computer Desk System: Synology DS-218+ NAS > Dell XPS 8930/NUC 10 i7  > HQP Desktop > xfinity Xfi Router > EtherRegen > ultraRendu > Topping D90 DAC > Audioengine A5+'s

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