Article: Keeping It Simple - Finding Great Values In Great Sound

[ednaz]

Very interested in this. We moved from a place with a very open first floor plan, and a wide open photo studio (with 16 foot ceilings)/printing shop in the basement. Two systems covered two floors. Our two offices were small nearfield systems that got relatively little use since we were often on Skype or other video calls. One of the office nearfield systems did "good enough" for the master bedroom it was attached to. Now we're in a more chopped up space with a different living pattern, since we're not working much at home or elsewhere. We need a few small systems that can fill a small to mid-sized room with super engaging sound. We tried various ways to use smart speakers, including wiring them into good quality integrated amps - which just made the crap louder.

 

I'm also getting a lot of questions about audio systems from my daughter's friends, when they visit and hear our main system. They're at the "just starting out" stage with godawful student loan burdens. A few of the reviews here were useful in helping them out. I will say this... audio has made HUGE leaps forward in sound quality per dollar. A $2000 all in system we put together for one of her friends sounds better than many $2000 systems I heard growing up (when $2000 would buy a car.)

 

Seeing the start of this series... I think we're going to slow roll the decisions in the hopes of some food for thought.

[ednaz]

1 hour ago, firedog said:

 

Orchestral music, especially something like Mahler, is a serious driver of the need for more expensive systems. You need a pretty powerful, dynamic system, with near full range frequency response to give you any kind of "real illusion" of orchestral music, especially crescendos and the like. With Rock, Jazz, and Chamber Music you can come a lot closer to an illusion of the band with a more modest system.

 

True 'dat, as they say in NOLA. As we mark time on a good sounding system for our living room, we're making do with a FoxL little blue tooth speaker. Rock, jazz, sound only OK, not really good enough for me to want to play it... but chamber music, where the lowest note is from a cello, there are only four instruments? It sounds pretty damn good, for background volume levels. Solo harpsichord? Good stuff. Even solo piano, like "Well Tempered Clavier" is good enough to enjoy, at admittedly background listening levels.

 

I do take a little issue with having to spend a lot of money to get satisfying orchestral sound, as long as you're smart in the used market. A neighbor of mine on a really tight budget (young and house poor) bought my M-Audio BX-8 powered studio monitors from me, used. A couple hundred dollars. Bought an iFi mini black (loaned her mine so she could try it before purchasing one). For well under a thousand dollars, she's got big orchestral sound that thumps your chest when the tympani play. She's a piano buff, and we listened to a couple different concerto with full orchestra cuts, and it was really very satisfying. We had to futz around with speaker placement quite a bit to tame the bass levels.

 

For everything new, I'm not sure she could have gotten the satisfying big sound she wanted at the price she could afford.

[ednaz]

1 hour ago, Geoffrey said:

John J,

 

Clearly, in this area, your dream woman and you have different priorities. Sonos is known for their simple, intuitive interface, that's what she loves about her Sonos. You, as an audiophile, place SQ as your highest priority. She will never be happy with a more cumbersome interface. You will never be happy with Sonos' at best mid-fi reproduction. Your mission is to find a much higher fidelity alternative to Sonos, one that makes you both happy. Anything less will ultimately, leave you both unhappy and at worst, resentful. Sooner or later, that alternative will appear, indeed it may already exist.

 

I have a couple of friends who could afford systems made with all new components at the highest end... and you'll never get them torn away from their Sonos. Company did a marvelous job on the UI.

 

One of them did get itchy after listening to my main system, and I helped him pick some good powered speakers that he could hook up to the Sonos Connect. It ended up sounding so much better than anything else he had, he's now changing his setups in a few more rooms to be Sonos Connect with powered speakers.

[ednaz]

19 hours ago, bluesman said:

 

That's exactly what the NUC with ROCK does - I haven't touched it since I set it up about 6 months ago.  Unlike my Win10 PC, it updates itself in the background without letting me know about it. I couldn't recommend this more highly.

....

My wife is like your friend's wife - she has never put on our sound systems for herself in 47 years of marriage.  I recently set up Alexa to do this for her by adding the House Band skill, so we can say "Alexa - call house band; play XXX in zone Y" and JRMC plays what is asked in the requested room(s).  I don't know how to make it any easier than that  

 

My main system DAC is from Exasound, and it requires a particular implementation of ASIO, and they only provide ASIO for Windows and Mac OS. (They WERE going to supply a Linux ASIO driver but... didn't.) So my media system is a Win10 computer that I built, running Roon. Exasound now has a streaming endpoint with ASIO built in which will free me to try to move to a simpler "set and forget" server, like your Rock/NUC. 

 

Are you running both JRiver and Roon on the NUC? I looked at House Band and it doesn't say it works with Roon. (I've never had any luck with both Roon and JRiver live at the same time... they get into arguments about controlling output to my main system.) I see on Roon that several people have built their own Alexa voice control for Roon, including turning their entire system on and off, while Roon officially claims it's too hard to do.

[ednaz]

1 hour ago, bluesman said:

 

No. The NUC is a dedicated Roon server and my main source for listening at home. I have JRMC on multiple Pis and a Win10 PC, so I can stream externally for travel. Roon is still LAN-only as far as I know.

 

I hoped that my wife would use Alexa to play music on JR, but that hope was dashed on the rocks like a skiff in a nor’easter. So I showed her how to ask Al to play music through her own speaker from Amazon Music.  Hasn’t happened yet.

 

OK, we're a pretty solid match. We use Roon on the dedicated music server - isn't a NUC, because I've got four 6tb disks inside... one holds our main music library, three are linked mirrors of the library. The only things it does other than that is rip CDs, look up support info for Roon or JRMC, and back up the music library to cloud. I use JRMC on my laptops... and am still on the fence about whether I will keep Roon, since my musical tastes significantly outpace their metadata. Roon integrates Qobuz and Tidal, JRMC doesn't. But JRMC's streaming capability for Radio Paradise, 440khz, and other high definition streaming stations is far superior.

I've figured out where my wife's "can't do this" comes from. She LOVES using Roon on her home office desktop to listen to streaming, or opera or jazz from our library. It's big on her screen, very graphic, point and click, doesn't feel crowded and small. The small devices (phones or iPads)  used to control Roon or JRMC on the large systems are where she throws her hands up. I understand completely. Their control device interfaces are afterthoughts.

 

I set up the Tidal skill on Alexa so she could ask for music from Tidal for our grandson, who is a dancing fool (at 20 months, if you put music on he'll dance for an hour, eyes half shut.) She can't get the hang of adding "Tidal" to the Alexa ask.

 

I used to lead teams that re-designed user interfaces to motivate usage and interest. I'd charge Roon or JRMC half my usual billing rate to lead a team to design a control UI that non-technical people would love to use.

[ednaz]

17 hours ago, firedog said:

What do you mean? All you need for Roon is to add the station URL.

Not really. Acc'd to them, they put a lot of time and thought into preparing the phone interfaces so you could do every thing on a phone you can do on other devices, and have a similar user experience. 

 But Roon is really designed to be on at least a 9 inch  high resolution screen.  I think they've stated that they recommend at least an  8 inch screen and 1200 X 800 resolution, but that  isn't optimal. And it works better on a larger screen.  A small phone sized device screen with very high resolution is going to make the various elements hard to see. Not trivial at all to make such a UI for a phone.  I do occasionally use my 5.5 inch android device set at FHD resolution as a control. I think it works fine, but I much prefer a larger screen, and that's really how Roon is meant to be used. 

I have RoonServer setup as my core. For control devices I've used various devices: 9,7 inch ipad, 13 inch Android tablet, and 12 inch Windows tablet (Surface pro with a wimpy "mobile" CPU) and a 14 inch high end Windows laptop They all give an identical and very good user experience, so it seems to me that the  control interfaces aren't afterthoughts at all. 

 

You can add the station URL to Roon. But... no metadata. You don't get the artist, album cover, song info. All of which JRMC handles effortlessly. So on Roon, I can get the HD streams... but I can't see the info on what I"m listening to. Interesting because Roon handles the low-res streams with full metadata support. OK, not full. They show artist and album, but it's not like listening to Tidal or Qobuz on Roon. That kind of inconsistency is what makes Sonos users love their systems, whatever the weaknesses.

HIgh res streams on Roon are also glitchy. Lose connections a lot. Doesn't reconnect smoothly. (The internet is still a mean and ugly place.) JRMC handles the glitches effortlessly. 

 

According to Roon they worked hard on the UI. But, having worked on a lot of UIs, from intermediate range missile launch systems used on the battle field under fire, to cars, to web sites designed for people in their 70s, they've fallen so short. On my phone, for example, Roon is vertical. On my tablet - OOPS. No vertical. They do behave just slightly differently. That's what causes unsophisticated users to abandon interfaces. Sonos is always Sonos.

I'm using Roon on an iPad Pro 9.7 inch and iPhone 6; my wife on an iPad Pro 10 inch and iPhone 6. The first time she held her iPad vertically, as she had her iiPhone 6, and it continued to display in landscape aspect... abandoned. I've seen this soooooo many times. The device interfaces don't look and behave exactly like the online ones. They're not adaptive to how you hold your device. Developers get annoyed about this - why can't users just learn. End users shouldn't have to learn. (and by and large won't.)

I interact with a couple dozen sites every day where the sites behave on my tablets and phones like they do on my laptop, where they adapt presentation to the screens' orientation, without changing how interaction happens. It's not easy. But it's not that hard.