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

@sns,

more computer power means more digital artefacts and more noise. There is a school of thought that in digital less is more. 

@antigrunge2

To counter that point, there is also a school of thought that more processing power brings higher resolution, expanded soundstage, and greater dynamics. Taiko and Pink Faun are subscribers of this philosophy. Quite a few audiophiles whom have built their own music servers have come to this conclusion. Both approaches can net great results, but I am seeing a trend where more processing power = more noise is being challenged.

@soix Spot on. Using airplay/blue tooth is tossing the baby out with the bathwater. Good olld hard wiriing best.

 

@audiom3 you could easily assign a static IP to a device (Roon Core) so you don't worry about IP's changing. I have a server that does video streaming with Plex, along with other home automation stuff, etc. and any server that's "serving up" data to endpoints I always set a static IP on it.