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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?  

troidelover1499

Showing 1 response by rbstehno

rbstehno
1,505 posts
 

The wadax server was in 1 of the worst sounding rooms at axpona this year by multiple reviewers. I didn’t believe any of the wadax server review in TAS either.

I went from using iTunes over 15 years ago, then using Pure Music and Audirvana for years, then going the dedicated server route using the Auralic Aries system running Lightning DS and Lumin software on it (superior to Aurender at that time).

The converted back to running Roon on a dedicated server. These servers over the years have ranged from a $50k Linux enterprise server using enterprise ssd technology to using a dedicated M1 Mac. Also tried new release of Audirvana but kept Roon.

The biggest advantage of all this was to get a quality dac that used Ethernet and i2s and place the server in a different room than my dedicated audio room. USB was the main cause of the sq degradation no matter what gimmicks/tweaks I purchased to increase sq.

Overall, I prefer Roon, then Audirvana, then Lightning DS, then Lumin in that order.

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