Shootout: Roon versus Plex, Qobuz versus Tidal: Who Won?

I did some remote LAN listening testing with Roon Arc.

Results were mixed. When the connection worked the sound was good. That was in the am. In the afternoon Roon arc indicated a weak connection and nothing much would stream. Meanwhile Plexamp worked perfectly as usual the whole time.

So looks like Roon still has work to do for remote streaming. The problem seems to be Roon Arc does not appear to downsample the music to match the bandwidth of a slower remote connection Plex does this well and delivers good sound via headphones at lower res with no problem. Plex is just better designed to deal with lower bandwidth network connections than Roon it seems. But at home, on the local LAN Roon sound quality rules.

Plexamp is also still more versatile when it comes to downloading music files so no network connection is needed. It handles downloads of playlists as well as albums . Roon Arc does not appear to handle download of playlists yet.

I use remote streaming from work quite a bit so looks like I will hold on to both Plex and Roon for now. Plex is inexpensive compared to Roon and still represents a good lower cost option overall or a good complement to Roon for remote streaming .

Just to add from my own experience…there are albums on Tidal that aren’t available on Qobuz. Some albums also sound better on Tidal. I always compare both and add to favorite the version that sounds best to me. 
I also use Roon. One of my favorite features is Roon radio. It allows you to discover tons of new great music. 

Mapman,

Thanks for the comparison’s. I have done the same, with my EVO 150, between Tidal and Qobuz and came to the same conclusion as you have....sound wise it’s a wash so Qobuz wins on being the cheaper option, although, from what I’v read, I think Tidal may have the larger catalog

The MQA makes it a difficult choice though as it is an easier load on the/my network even though my provider is fi-optic.

Curious as to what Roon input settings you used, did you bi-pass MQA in comparison, as I did? If so did you stream using DSD up-sampling settings, which is what causes clipping and freezing on my network? I seem to gravitate to the DSD settings when available. It seems as if MQA diminishes the choices of Roon upsampling to no choice?? Do you agree, about MQA diminishing the choices, or am I missing something, which is entirely possible.

I recently, after the comparison, got new speakers LSR+ replacing the older LSR. I have now discovered that much of my fiddling was due to the hi-mid frequency roughness of the LSRs. Plus my room has 16 windows so that roughness was exaggerated 4 fold. Now I care much less about settings but I am still curious what settings you and others use with the EVO or any equipment that has a MQA upsampling DAC.

I've tried all of those services and stayed with Tidal. Roon shouldn't be in the mix since it isn't really a streaming service like the others. They can't improve the sound unless you possibly use convolution filters.

Since Lumin has announced support for Plex, I did a casual comparison. My results were very different to yours. Plex(amp) did not sound worse than Roon. And that was a bit of a disappointment to be honest. I expected Roon to sound better (being a Roon lifetime sub), but it just didn't.  It was too close to call if either sounded different, let alone better. I'll be doing several more comparisons in the future though.