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?
Observation of Roon forums with those having issues, one will find problems nearly 100% of time individual in nature. Extremely rare to find a single issue universal to a particular version of Roon.
If there was a problem with a particular iteration of Roon wouldn't you think this would affect all or nearly all users of Roon! |
Having read countless threads discussing digital sound quality, can anyone corroborate or counter what @blisshifi is saying? It seems to me the dac and speakers are the key factors in resolution not really anything else assuming bandwidth is flowing and adequate. |
And @sonicfanatic what exactly do you need corroborated? That the quality of a streamer / server will advance the quality of the final sonic outcome? |
Network issues can be very complicated. I will admit, far more complicated than my networking smarts allow for. Issues with TCP, UPnP, router IP conflicts and on and on. As I was on the steep learning curve, I was having plenty of issues too. I even had the guys at SGC try to figure out why I couldn't run their software consistently in the opticalRendu and we eventually gave up and I returned everything. And they really know their stuff - far more than the average Joe, so that should tell you a lot. I've since rebuilt my LAN with fiber optic, added managed fiber switches, new fiber router, PSU's, etc, etc. And now Roon is ROCK solid (pun intended as I run ROCK via a NUC). It doesn't disconnect, doesn't cut off the ends of songs, doesn't skip a beat or anything else unpredictable. I *think* restarting Roon software/device temporarily refreshes the IP addresses and something (another device most likely) borks it down the road (it becomes conflicted). But it's too complicated to have any certainty.
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