Does ROON sound different?

It may sound different out of the can than others. I did a/b compare of Roon with Plex prior to signing up and Roon was clearly better. I did a thread about my results here that you might find in a search if desired.

Also optionally you can use the built in DSP to tweak the sound pretty much any way you want or not. So with Roon you have unlimited sound options and not trapped into any single one.  That’s part of the magic possible only with digital streaming. 

Perhaps Roon has some 'house sound', but who knows what exactly that is. Sound quality of Roon dependent on your entire streaming and audio system. SQ of Roon has never been an issue for me, this compared to playing or ripped cd's and my proprietary Euphony Stylus player. Roon's DSP is pretty lousy, is one requires dsp get the HQPlayer app, far superior to Roon's. IME Roon best sq with minimal processing within the Roon player, this means turning off things like volume leveling, dsp, excessive library analytics.

Agree different things will sound different, but in any case, sound quality is a cornerstone of Roon, not an issue.  

Well, I use the dedicated Roon Music Server, the Roon Nucleus Plus (4TB), and it sounds absolutely incredible in my audio system.  Happy listening.     

With a sonictransporter to Bricasti renderer via ethernet the difference between jplay/mconnect and Roon is small. I would say Roon is a bit softer in the upper midrange and images do not stand out in such relief as jplay. That is for better or worse, though, as I sometimes prefer the slightly more relaxed Roon sound. I do not know what is the actual difference, so hard to say which one is "right". Maybe if I had a soft sounding system I would think the jplay is for sure better, but I don’t.