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Roon vs OS and Native Players - Impact on SQ?

My conclusion / assumption is these designers maximized (or maybe "tuned / shaped") their native players to get best sound versus doing a pass through of the Roon player. 
 

@buickwilson posted the above statement in the following thread, which I’ve been wondering about for a while. There’s been countless posts from Innuos members stating that their streaming experience is better through the Innuos Sense App in comparison to Roon. I also found this to be true with BluOS in comparison to Roon and Tidal Connect (and naturally Spotify Connect).

I now run Roon through an OpticalRendu via the Sonic Orbiter OS which does not have a native player. As a Roon user I’m wondering:

A. Have other Roon users experienced an uptick in sound quality when they’ve completely stepped away from Innuos or BluOS native players (and others) while using Roon on an OS that does not have a native player - like Sonic Orbiter for example?

B. As a Roon user, how much of a bottleneck are we talking about in terms of diminished SQ when comparing Roon to Aurender, Lumin, and Innuos native players?

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Showing 2 responses by mgrif104

mgrif104
328 posts
 

@jbuhl 

I was hosting the core on a souped up Mac mini dedicated to that task alone. I turned off everything else and had 16 GB memory and a solid state drive. 

I’m not trying to say Roon can’t sound quite good - it did for me. But, the native OS and library management software to my Auralic unit sounded significantly better. 

I can easily imagine that Grimm and WADAX have optimized things such that Roon performs at a very high level. But I stick with my contention that making software work across a wide variety of hardware/platforms is very difficult - and would be nearly impossible to optimize for each. Just like Windows.

There is an important take away in this that I’ve mentioned before. For those of us with hardware that’s Roon certified - that also has a native app - why not have both? In my Auralic unit, I could easily have Roon for everyday listening and switch to Lightning DS for serious listening. It’s perfectly fine to have both options. That said, I am also perfectly fine with the UI and operability of Lightning DS. So, I just don’t really need Roon. I’d keep it if it sounded better but it doesn’t.

My experience only. YMMV.

Best,

mgrif104
328 posts
 

When I compared Roon through my Auralic Aries G2 vs their native lightning DS on the same streaming file, I dropped Roon that day. I was not the only one to come to that conclusion. It’s not because Auralic struggles with Roon. Quite the opposite.

My belief (I don’t have factual data to back up but it is a logical conclusion) is that Roon must operate across many hardware systems (much like MSFT windows) and proprietary OS are able to address cache and buffers directly. Each hardware system is different in this regard. Size, signal path, etc are different in every device. And, similar to windows performance being variable across different hardware systems, Roon must do the same. After all, our streamers are computers that are optimized for the task at hand. Why wouldn’t we expect there to be differences in performance?  

For those that believe digital files are merely 1s and 0s, that is true. But the slope of the voltage change that helps a DAC interpret the 1 or 0 is measurably different across sources. And, noise (not hiss) is carried along for the ride. So, after experiencing it directly, I put a fair amount of thought to why and it’s no longer a surprise to me that software can sound different, and hardware too.

Best,

mgrif104

 

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