Roon 1.8 Discussion

[austinpop]

Interesting discussion on Roon. I am a Lifetime subscriber, and will say up front that the Roon UI is a thing of beauty. More than the UI, it's the UX (user experience) that is really transformative. They took something that was clunky and fiddly in the past (UPnP, LMS, etc) and made it elegant and attractive. I give them a lot of kudos for that. 

 

The areas where I have issues with Roon the product, and Roon the company are:

• Roon has fallen further and further behind on absolute SQ, compared to the best players out there. Granted, this may be a don't care for some fraction (whether 80%, 90% or something else) of the user base, but for those who care about ultimate SQ, it is a reality.
• This in itself isn't as bad as the fact that Roon does not seem to acknowledge this as an issue. Attempts to bring this to their attention -- believe me, I've tried -- have fallen on deaf ears.
• When even the most talented system builders like Emile Bok of Taiko, who tried very hard to make Roon perform at the highest SQ on the Extreme server, throw up their hands, privately declare Roon as unworkable, and invest considerable funds to develop their own solution, it just reinforces the point that Roon are unwilling to focus on SQ as a priority.
• Which brings me to the most egregious issue I have with Roon -- their forum. There is simply no way to engage with them directly to raise issues like the above, provide evidence, etc. No, you have to post on their forum. And then endure the insults and brickbats of the peanut gallery. I have done this before, tried to encourage Roon to try their competition, and hear it for themselves. But to do this, I got all kinds of abuse on their forum. I left in disgust.

The fact of the matter is that Roon does have a complex architecture. Due to their ability to support multiple endpoints from one Core, with the ability to group them, this leads to complex synchronization concerns, which make SQ optimizations like caching and/or pre-buffering a challenge. I get that.

 

But these are not insurmountable problems. For example, they could explore a "high performance" mode that implements SQ optimizations as long as the user accepts that only one endpoint can be active, and grouping is disabled in this mode.

 

I'm not saying this is the answer, but the point is we never get to these conversations, because well before that point, the "mob" on their forum has swarmed over and smothered the request.

 

At this point, I've moved on. I have better options for extremely high SQ players. I still have my lifetime subscription to Roon, and I use it for noncritical listening, to discover new interesting music.

[austinpop]

9 minutes ago, happybob said:

I do hold out some hope that the coming major upgrade to v2.0 might address some of these SQ issues. Maybe not high probability, but still a possibility.

I would welcome that. Do we any indications that they recognize SQ is an issue, and are actively working to address? I have not seen anything.