Sound quality of Roon

I have been a ROON license holder even before it was released (maybe 2015). ROON has settled into a very nice sounding (there are ways to tailor the sound in ROON), reliable, and easy to use interface (less MAC like now).

If you want to something close to the best streaming I think a FMC after your network switch and then a fibre optical to remove analog noise before it gets into the DAC will give you reference level sound. 

There are many ways to do this and I do it as follows (ROON Core in another room):

Network Switch -> EtherRegen (used it in reverse B to A) -> Fibre Optical to Sonore OpticalRendu -> USB to DAC  

The ONLY time I had an issue was when  placed my cheapo ROON Core PC behind the PowerLine part of my home network and I was playing hi-res streams. I had QoS network issues that manifested as distortion. I could reproduce this 100/100 times. So my solution to this was to move my cheapo computer to the faster Ethernet side of my home network.

ROON is TCP. it is guaranteed delivery in theory at the network protocol level. However, how the network deals with congestion varies. I believe with ROON the network is told to drop the packets and the sender will scale down the sending. So this will result in some audible distortion. Without the congestion ROON is great at delivering the packets. The congestion is not the fault of ROON.

ROON also has the ability to deliver a Grouped stream of the same music at the same time to multiple ROON Endpoints in varies rooms. That is pretty impressive and complicated.

ROON has support for Convolution filters. This is a big deal with headphones and I also used it also for 2-channel.

The most cost effective audio purchase I ever made was a Lifetime Subscription to ROON for $450 before ROON was even released.

Thank you again to all who have taken the time to post their thoughts. My thinking at present is to get an Innuos Zen Mini, which can run the core Roon program, as well as be a pretty good streamer. (Thanks to @jjss49 for that idea.). The raw computing processing power in the Zen Mini is not great but I will only use one streamer and don’t think I will use its DSP which I understand can be a resource hog.

There is also a DAC built in the Mini even if some feel it is sort of a starter DAC. This way I can try the Innuos app and also Roon, and compare the music streamed from Tidal those two ways. That unit is nice since there are several upgrade steps for instance going to a better power supply as well as going straight out from its digital output to feed a better DAC. I do have a Schiit Gungnir MB I like how it sounds, and I think it is a good dac in its price range, using it with a Node right now.

I am an audiophile and electronic engineer.  I dont know everything, but I happen to have two friends who are a dealer for high end and the other one is importer/distributor for high end, here in Brazil.  I usually do product testing for them, purely subjective, no measurements.  I love to do it, so I do it for free, and when I think I reached a reasonable conclusion, I invite them to come and listen by themselves.  I keep doing it because of the joy of testing super high end equipment that I get to keep for several weeks at a time.

Enough introduction, here are MY findings, based on my experiences and the products I have tried:

1.  If you have mid Fi it is difficult to hear some of the differences.  Some products really shine when you have a set up with enough resolution.

2. The quality of your network is very important.  It is not the same to listen to Roon in a regular network vs one with a good audiophile switch, external power supplies and clocks.

3. Roon can sound very very good, and be completely satisfying.  Depending on the demand of the listner, you may need a very good audio server/network/DAC to achieve the maximum sound quality Roon can give.

4. Having said the above, under the same super high end set up, music will still sound a tad better when playing with a plain vanilla UPnP App.  Of course, you cannot compare the user experience to using Roon.

So there you go, Roon can be very very good, but an App like BubbleUPnP, while not giving so many goodies like UI and DSP, can sound a couple notches better.  

OP, since you are thinking about buying Innuos, I strongly suggest you skip buying Roon and just use the Sense product. Most all users find Sense sounds better. You can read about this on the Roon and Innuos Internet forums. I would only say this for Innuos users. At least start off without Roon and listen.

@vgmbpty

Roon can be very very good, but an App like BubbleUPnP, while not giving so many goodies like UI and DSP, can sound a couple notches better.

do tell, why would this be the case, all else equal (same setup, Roon properly implemented, jitter and noise management handled)??

@grannyring 

i think my point to the op is by using the innuos zen mini 'starter' set, he is equipped to do comparisons for himself and find out