+1 on how great Tidal is, but also +++1 on how great the addition of ROON is on top of Tidal. There is a quirk with Roon (or at least I see it as a quirk) that I have to ’add to library’ tracks on Tidal for Roon to then interpret the album or track as part of my music library (it's not actually downloading but more like 'tagging' music as part of my library). Because of this philosophy, I find Roon to be somewhat limited from a music-discovery perspective; I always have to go to the Tidal interface whithin Roon to explore new music, but it’s not a biggie really - still a quirk they should work on.
Most importantly though - the key benefits of ROON:
Roon properly interprets and manages classical music (Spotify or even Tidal doesn’t do a good job with this).
Roon supports a full, lovely iPad app that makes for a wonderful remote.
Roon shows music lyrics, album reviews and other metadata that is fun to explore while listening to the music of the band in question - it’s a great accompaniment to the listening experience.
Roon supports technical integration with things like HQPlayer, allowing me to upsample all Roon tracks to DSD on the fly.
The last point above is HUGE, as it allows me to play all music via DSD 128 via my Lampizator Big 7 chipless DSD dac. The resulting sound quality is jaw-dropping. I paid the $500 for livetime Roon membership and I think anyone who doesn’t is pretty shortsighted, considering we spend more than that (in some cases orders of magnitude more) on the likes of an interconnect or some audio accessory.
Tidal has been an amazing step forward in the music experience vs. what came before it, but Roon (plus HQPlayer plus Lampizator chipless DSD dac) is a revelation and takes things to a whole new level.
