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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 willrich47

willrich47
54 posts
 

@troidelover1499 There's a lot of great insights on here. This topic has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks for other reasons. Here are a couple of thoughts:

 

1.) I currently use Roon streamed from a dedicated Mac Mini (M1). My current digital setup consists of Roon --> HQPlayer (non-upsampling) --> Curious Cable USB --> Denafrip Hermes DDC --> AudioQuest Carbon HDMI I2S --> Denafrips Terminator II.

 

2.) Roon is a product that is generalized to work all kinds of different hardware, virtually none of which is optimized for digital audio playback. Jitter is a constant negative variable in digital audio SQ, and many hardware manufacturers (like Apple) aren't necessarily concerned with digital audio playback. Personally, I think the Mac M1 chips sound better than the older Intel chips. 

 

3.) Jitter IS a problem that virtually all DAC manufacturers address and mitigate with varying degrees of success. Digital-to-Digital converters from manufacturers like iFi and Denafrips can help mitigate that issue a little more. A DDC is something that I think can help improve the SQ of a Roon music player. 

 

4.) It is true that some streamer manufacturers may focus their hardware on the elimination of jitter and producing a clean audio stream for the DAC, and thus higher sound quality. However, I suspect that most of those manufacturers focus their efforts first on the user experience (since it is the most visible), and second on the hardware. I also think there are fewer manufacturers that put a great deal of effort into both of those things, and can produce streamers with better SQ results than Roon. 

 

5.) For me, Roon and HQPlayer on an M1 Mac platform give a lot of flexibility. I currently use HQPlayer as the transport of sorts (without upsampling, which I know is weird) between Roon and my DDC because I think it sounds better. I'm somewhat conflicted on upsampling right now, but at a minimum what I can say is that it can give a few more "flavors" of sound to choose from. That said, many of those kinds of options are just out of the question with a dedicated streamer.

 

For now, this setup works really well for me, but I'm always on the lookout for something better. Best of luck. 

 

 

 

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