Roon always a little detrimental to the sound. I have tried it several times. I guess it’s nice for people who know nothing about the history of music.
Is there a ROON sound?
I finally had to give in and open a ROON account. I bought the highly recommended 432 EVO Aeon server, but it only works with ROON (as an endpoint) or the Logitech Media Server. The latter seemed a bit awkward to get going, so I started a ROON account (so far for a year). The server offers a plethora of filter and up-sampling choices, let alone the unique ability to change the orchestral pitch to 432 Hz down from the now common 440Hz (the way Mozart or even Verdi heard their music before 440 became the common recording standard for sounding "crisper"). [I have tried this option several times but was underwhelmed. But that's just my personal first take on the subject]
Up to now, I listened to most of my music either through Apple Music as ALAC files or Quobuz as FLAC; I also have a Native DSD library and another with YouTube downloads (FLAC as well). The latter go directly from my MacBook Air (M1 chip) to my MSB Discrete DAC, or through an Audirvana rinse cycle.
My first impression listening to the 432EVO/ROON combination on "Brothers in Arms" was like listening with lightly compressed cotton plugs in my ears. That was with the manufacturer-recommended upsampling rate and filter-choice. I could hardly understand any of Mark Knopfler's (admittedly mumbling) musings! I immediately switched back to my Apple Music version and at least heard things like "through the fields of destruction - baptism of fire" and other text bites. The overall presentation was sharper and more acoustically demanding, but with admittedly less-wide soundstage. I then switched back to the server/ROON combo and disabled all filters and upsampling, going into bit-perfect mode. But even then, the overall presentation, while admittedly more bass heavy and spacious, the singer's words were still hardly intelligible. I actually think that "Brothers in Arms" is a really good example to test for a component ability to shine light on sung or spoken words; another favorite example is Boz Scaggs' "Thanks to You", where the clearest presentation in my system comes from the LP (which is called "Dig"), followed by Quobuz.
I went back to the 2022 review of the Aeon server in Absolute Sound by Andrew Quint, where he extolls the sonic virtues of the instrument (but, like myself, did not like the lower pitch option). I trust that he could not detect the same flaws as I did, albeit streaming from ROON as well.
I understand that ROON emerged from the previous SONOS company. A good friend of ours was one of the first SONOS adopters some 30 years ago, but I never liked it in a musicality sense, especially the gooey bass. To me it always sounded like Musak. So, I might be a bit prejudiced here, because what I am hearing now from ROON is as "pleasing" as the old SONOS; kinda lounge character, but not really stirring or attention-grabbing.
So, I would like to hear the unvarnished truth from this illustrious audience, what their experience with ROON is in terms of musicality and neutral/natural presentation, especially if they can offer some kind of A/B comparison from their own listening experience. As I said, I have zero previous experience with ROON, and might just be a bit biased here.
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I’ve been streaming for over 20 years now with many different software applications: Apple iTunes in the early 2000’s, amarra, pure music, audirvana, lightning ds, lumin, (using upnp and minimserver), roon, and Qobuz connect. 20 years ago I got rid of my $3500 Classe cd player because ripped music sounded better than from a cd. I still have my 20+ year old Sony SACD player which still sounds good but I’ve used it 5 times in the last 15 years. Software does effect the sound quality as does the hardware and OS you are running it on. All the software up until auralic’s lightning DS ran on a Mac, I ran lightning ds and the lumin software on the Auralic Aries streamer/server. In the last 2 weeks, my airlens streamer got a new firmware upgrade for Qobuz connect and Connect sounds better than roon, again not subtle since my friends all indicated this sounded better. Right now, I can’t live with the Connect app, plus I have thousands of cds ripped to my server that connect can’t access. If Connect updates their gui, I might migrate to that in the future, but since I have ripped dsd files and Roon still sounds good, I’m using roon. I sold my $15k TT setup/phono preamp and hundreds of vinyl albums because my digital setup sounded better. |
When I first evaluated Roon (almost a decade ago), I evaluated it against Audirvana (both installed on my Apple MacBook Pro with a directly attached USB DAC) and found Roon's sound quality to be lacking in that comparison. This article explains why: https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/sound-quality What I learned: if you want the best results, start by following the manufacturer's instructions. After I adopted the distributed architecture and network topology that Roon Labs recommends, sound quality and reliability from Roon matches or exceeds all other alternatives that I've tried. No, There is no "Roon sound." However, to get the most out of it (like most things in this hobby), it must be set up properly. |
The only software that can provide for differences in sound quality is OS run on streamers. Higher end streamer manufacturers expound much energy on optimizing and developing proprietary OS, they understand benefits derived from this. Harmonizing OS with the specific hardware chosen is key for optimal performance. As for the proprietary music players some streamer manufacturers provide, I would fully expect this to provide superior sound quality to the generalist music players such as Roon, Audirvana etc. To get optimal SQ from Roon you need to provide a streaming chain optimized for Roon, and this goes for every single music player app.
Again, there is no inherent sound quality to ANY music player app, BITS IS BITS! There is another thread running concurrently to this in respect to determining if audio files are somehow changed/corrupted traveling the world wide internet. Again, they are not, BITS IS BITS. So, if we accept bits is bits, do people actually believe these music player apps are manipulating bits somehow in the transfer of audio files provided by the record companies or whoever owns those audio files? |
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