I have a fairly simple setup. Microsoft surface as a core and a sonore roon player feeding an audio gd dac with usb. The speakers, amplifier, and speaker cable are the same I auditioned with using a lumin streamer and Aqua audio dac. Plan was to purchase the dac and streamer when funds replenished. In my system, the sq is just as good, if not better at present. What surprised me was Amazon hd music with an android tablet and a chromecast audio streamer via a budget toslink cable. Perhaps a little less detail than room, but excellent sound. My thought is how the dac isolates, caches, and converts the data is primary
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?