Current quality of Rune

It's not only Roon that has a sound type, in my experience it's the OS type and setup that Roon operates in that affects Roon's final sound.

Until recently, Pink Faun used Euphony as their OS. This OS offers many playback setups including Euphony's own Stylus and Roon. Roon didn't sound nearly as good as Stylus in this setup.

Recently Pink Faun wrote their own OS with dedicated drivers to talk directly to their output cards and set it up so the heavy requirements of Roon search and playback were managed properly. Now Roon sounds better than Euphony/Stylus and will be their standard for their streamers going forward.

Roon is really the pinnacle of music discovery and management, it is acknowledged as the best there is with many hifi brands licensing or pre-installing it into their machines. The main problem with Roon is that it usually sounds only mediocre for higher end hifi enthusiasts. But it can be made to sound good if it is setup well in the correct OS, something difficult but worth doing.

@sns Yup, agreed. For sure if you focus enough on making Roon sound good it can achieve very high levels. The effort is worth it as the interface is so good.

It doesn’t take much to beat the design of the Stylus interface haha. But considerable effort to top the sound of an optimized Stylus, maybe beyond those getting started in streaming.

I too use Euphony OS (still) on my optimized Pink Faun 2.16x with 3 point-installed OCXO Ultra clocks playing an optimized Stylus to the Pink Faun Ultra USB bridge externally powered by an external Teflon Paul Hynes DR7t+. This single box combination along with QSA Landri wires gives me my best sound to date. Looking forward to besting this with the new PF OS with a Roon install which is my preferred interface.