I have had it with Roon, their lack of support, their user forum, and it's users...

[happybob]

5 hours ago, austinpop said:

I had the same experience in the Roon forums as you, @AudioDoctor, and left in disgust. Life's too short for that nonsense.

 

All one has to do is to listen to alternatives, like Stylus on Euphony OS, or HQPlayer 4 Desktop playing files directly, and the case is made.

 

I had a simple request to the Roon team. "Conduct listening tests on your competition." But one can't just go to them directly and ask them. No, you have to post on their forum, and then endure  the taunts and insults of the peanut gallery.

 

I accept my lifetime subscription is a sunk cost, but I do use Roon for noncritical listening and music discovery on Qobuz. Their UI and UX are excellent. Pity about the SQ.

It is indeed sad that Roon is not prioritizing sound quality. And I, like you have found the Roon forums to be a lost cause.

 

I'm now evolving into mixed-use model. For "multiroom aka multizone" mode, Roon is great. I normally listen this way in a "fill the house with sound" mode in the early evenings - and I have 3 systems all playing the same content. I'm not aware of any other solution that works as well and that sounds "good enough".

 

That said, I've somewhat recently become a convert to PGGB (nothing short of amazing! Know anyone who wants to buy a used MScaler?) for direct listening on my highend system (Abyss headphones, Dave DC4 modded DAC, Formula S amp) and have been amazed at how much better the direct-feed (even direct from my Mac) is than Roon from a server. I'm wanting to head to a Taiko Extreme (or maybe a new gen 2.0 Innuos) server feeding the content directly to my SRC-DX which then feeds the Dave (and also some other systems - but perhaps only one system at a time??). But for an interim solution I'm experimenting with just using the standard Mac "Music" app to play my PGGB files (not even using the server for playback) and they sound quite a bit better than Roon sourced playback of those same PGGB files. I imagine something like Audirvana on the Mac would be even better - but I am going to go the Taiko or Innous route for the best SQ.

 

One last thing that makes Roon less important for me (except for multi-room mode) is that since moving to PGGB, I stream much less (mostly Qobuz, some Tidal), and listen to purchased and "garble blasted" upsampled files a lot more. I also have a large ripped CD library that is slowly being upsampled. 

 

The game continues!

[happybob]

5 hours ago, bobfa said:

I have been testing different OS variants and MPD + UPNP and more.  They all sound better than Roon.  Some of the control point apps are “funky”!

 

I have played with Lumin a bit and it is pretty nice.  I think I might have found a home in Aurender.  I  will have a post up shortly on some of my findings.  

 

At least with the Linux variants you have some more control of your world!!

Aurender does sound better than Roon - I verified this a while back. One challenge I and perhaps some have is that I sometimes do still need to use Roon (for multiroom playback) and Aurender does not run Roon at all (even as an option) from what I understand. Other servers like Innous and Taiko do albeit can get quite expensive...  At least we have options and more clarity that Roon is distancing itself from folks who care a lot about sound quality. We can always hope thought that the big 2.0 Roon release might actually give us great SQ again!

[happybob]

10 minutes ago, kennyb123 said:

How were you able to verify that Aurender sounds better without being able to run Roon on the same box?  I’m sure you’re right - just curious though.

I compared Roon on a Mac to Roon on a Nucleus to an Aurender - all with Dave DAC feeding Focal Utopia headphones. All playing the same content, and yes these were different boxes so to speak, so we can’t know how much is due to Aurender software or Aurender hardware - but other folks have tested the same hardware (like Innuos) with Roon vs other software  on the same box and Roon generally loses the competition. In my test Mac and Nucleus about equal, Aurender was noticeably better.