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.

@flkin I have Euphony OS on custom build streamer, also have Sonore OpticalRendu streamer. Running in bridged mode, custom build contains Roon core, OR Roon Endpoint. I can also go Roon core on custom, Stylus endpoint on OR. Finally in unbridged mode, custom build only streamer, OR out of system, full Roon or full Stylus. I won't go through sound quality with each option, but running bridged mode, Roon core on custom build, Roon endpoint on OpticalRendu best sound quality, betters Stylus endpoint. As for running full Stylus, which I can do with and without the optical conversion setup with the Sonore equipment, user interface with Stylus terrrible vs Roon with my huge library. This to the point don't care if  Stylus does sound a bit better. I can only say improvements in Roon sound quality directly correlate with system improvements, no sins of commission I can detect.

My theory as to Roon sound quality variations is Roon will sound best with powerful processor/low latency streamers since Roon requires much from processor resources. All the conveniences of Roon demands work from processor, work means noise. With my processor, 9 cores I'm often using  only 1 or 2% of processor resources, this means low noise.

@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.

@sls83

Congrats on walking away

Worst company ever

I have to throw my hat in the ring of Roon fans.  I think that it is excellent.  Great interface, works perfectly, randomly plays new music consistent with what I was listening to and have through that discovered new music and artists!  It is stellar. I also like the writeups about the albums and have actually learned things about music that I have listened to for years! I bought a lifetime plan when it first came out and that has been a great purchase.  However, as @phishhhhh4 pointed out, their tech support is below subpar.  if you have a problem, you must post it on their community forum.  To Roon’s credit, they do actually respond to those support posts, but it is cumbersome to post a problem, wait for a response, then respond to that, wait again, etc.  Luckily, I have been able to troubleshoot any issues myself.  The one thing about Roon that really is glitchy is their ARC app, which supposedly lets you stream to your iPhone when you are away from your network.  It is useless.  It works maybe 25% of the time, if that.  Most of the time it can’t connect.  it is perplexing that a free program like Plex, for example, has no problem connecting to the home server, but Roon can’t figure it out.  So I usually use Plex outside of the home.  But other than that, I can’t imagine another way to manage my music.