I have used Roon/Tidal for 5 years. Problem with discussing "Roon sound quality" is that Roon is not a box you can take home and assess over a few hours. You should run it (preferably ROCK variant) on a custom server such as Nucleus. You should follow Roon's advice to use good LAN endpoints to drive your DACs or buy a Roon ready LAN DAC. You should have a dedicated audio LAN and decent power supplies to power everything. You should go through every setting (including DSP) to find what works best for your system and taste (DACs sound different at different sampling rates). The cost is quite high and it takes months of your time but the reward is sublime sound in the main system, music all around the house and easy browsing and discovery of new music.
Sound quality of Roon
I am considering trying Roon. I have been using my Bluesound Node but I am going to upgrade as I do enjoy streaming more and more using Tidal. It is quite an investment to get a NUC or Nucleus and then have a separate tablet to control it all.
But apart from the cost I have read some people say Roon does not sound good. Their streamer by blah blah sounds better. Is this true? For all that is required to use Roon, the hardware, the subscription and all, would Roon be popular if it made digital streaming sound bad?
I would love to hear people who have experience comment on this. There is info on the Roon Labs discussion site but as you can imagine it is saying this is BS Roon sounds great. I guess Roon as a software also has had updates, so maybe this is a thing that might have been true in the past?