Is Roon The Best Sounding Option For Us?


I am a bit hesitant to post this question, but it is based on experiences I had in my system this weekend.

I have a lifetime subscription to Roon I bought a couple of years back, so I do have a financial interest in it excelling. I also bought a copy of Audirvana 3.5 which is now a legacy platform. In the past I have found small but interesting differences between them, but ran Roon for the last couple of years. 

Now my computer system may be the issue here. I am using a late 2014 Mac Mini with PI Audio power cord built for use with the Mini. I am planning on a streamer sometime this year, but do not know what or when. 

what I am finding sound wise is that Roon presents as more precise, and superior at fine detail. But it sounds compact and closed in with a reduction in acoustic space. On the other hand, Audirvana does space so so much better, and the music feels like it flows better with texture and harmonic decay. The differences are not subtle, and it surprises me they exist. 

Roon is the 800 pound gorilla in our hobby now. But I wonder if others have done any comparisons to alternate music playback forums and what have you found? I know Roon should only be a origination system, and can run in front of a streamer as a library, and that digital is just packets of information, but its hard to deny what is in front of your face when both programs are run one after the other. . I wonder if it has become a hardware problem where the demands of the Roon system has outstripped the capabilities of the computer. 

neonknight

Showing 1 response by yyzsantabarbara

Get Roon BEHIND a fibre optic cable and you can then run Roon on any decent computer. I use a $500 DELL micro-computer that has no monitor | keyboard | mouse. I just RDP into the machine on the rare time I need to do something on the Roon Core server.

Digital packets are not all the same. The 1's and 0's are represented by analog signals. Using fibre alleviates a lot of the network (Ethernet) gremlins that make various streaming components sound different.

I also use a Sonore OpticalRendu as the poster above. Actually, I have 3 of them and can sell 1 since I now have finalized on 2 DACs.

BTW - streamers do not sound the same. I had 3 tops of the line streamers in the house at one time and compared 

  • Lumin X1
  • Sonore OpticalRendu
  • PlayBack Designs STREAM-IF

When my opticaRendu dies I will get a Lumin U2 streamer.