Sound quality of Roon

@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. 

@kray agreed and I definitely employ static IP addresses in my LAN.  For all important devices anyway...streamers, switches, DAC/endpoints, processors, servers, etc.  That could be yet another reason ROCK has been incredibly stable for me.

@sns  said:  Doesn't your admittance that some may not experience reliability issues,  and many testaments from those who also don't experience these issues prove there is no inherent reliability issues with Roon?

No, I don't follow that logic.  Roon offers a lot of features, and many people don't use them and thus don't see the issues.  My supposition is that tag queries and searches tax the database in some way that creates a resource problem and the core application doesn't recover until restarted. It's just a guess based on heavy database usage correlating with Roon choking on many occasions.  But even if I just leave it open for 2-3 days it needs a restart.

And as I said above, using multiple remotes also seems to correlate with some of the stability issues I've seen.  

The problem isn't one is pressing Roon too hard, it''s that Roon is pressing the server beyond it's capabilities. Roon can be both processing heavy or not, be prepared to have more processing ability with server for users maxing out Roon processing.

I've got a dedicated Roon core:  Core i7, 11th generation, 8 cores (16 logical) with standard speed at 3.60 Ghz and peak of 5 GHz, 32GB RAM and a PCI 4.0 SSD - the fasted the board will take.  That machine can probably process 5 streams of 4K video and still run a browser window.  Short of IBM's Blue, what kind of machine do you think won't be taxed by Roon?

IMO Roon gets a bad name by providing many conveniences without more clearly stating the need for more processing power with these convieniences. Roon, with it's complex interface already more process intensive than some of the other players, many servers simply don't have the engine to provide much more than elemental Roon settings.

This is all true...except not in my house.  I have a 10G network and the above spec'd Roon core.  I've been running movies and music over digital networks for over 25 years, have built probably 150 computers over that period, and been the network admin for my own dot-com startup. I've now built 6 Roon cores (we have 2 houses and I upgrade frequently).

I guess what I'm saying is I think I'd have a sense of when software is stable and when my setup is the problem.

Yes, I could tone down what I do with Roon (I use 4 endpoints in a zone, 3 remotes, 2-4 web displays simultaneously) but I don't see why I would.  I push Roon and it piddles.  I see plenty of others with similar issues on the Roon forum.

To be clear, I am a huge Roon fan.  I would just like to see them focus on stability across platforms before pushing forward.  They've made a different calculation and it's their product.  But when I see people say that Roon is perfectly stable I'll call that out.  It is not.  It's great.  But (1) web displays and remotes show the previous artist instead of the current one quite often; (2) remotes "lose" album cover thumbnails and occasionally the full size version; (3) web displays often lose artist images; (4) tracks stop at the end and "play" has to be pushed, and occasionally stop in the middle; (5) Roon pops messages that "files are loading slowly" and stops playing, then immediately remedies that when the Roon core is restarted; (6) Roon will just close itself sometimes; (6) Roon stops playing IP radio frequently, and often tells me the station has disappeared; and (7) crossfade will abruptly stop a track about 5 seconds before it's done playing and then miss the first second of the next track, instead of actually crossfading.

I'm not here to criticize anyone's choice of Roon. But it does have inherent stability problems.  

IME Roon can sound great - but SQ does vary with how you have it implemented, You won't get best SQ having Core and control on the same machine and connecting a generic computer via usb to your DAC.

I posted this in another thread but I think its relevant to this discussion:

I had been running a 2012 Mac mini, with Uptone JS2/MMK linear PS and fan mod, with Roon server for years.

I also use HQPlayer as the output renderer for Roon. Back in 2020 I bought an M1 mini to experiment with and tried various combinations including running Roon all-in-one (control/server) and HQPlayer on the M1. I  settled for retaining the 2012 mini as the separate Roon server and running HQPlayer from the M1 mini - both connected to an Uptone Etherregen switch with the 'B' side of the Etherregen going to a Sonore UltraRendu then to my DAC. 

However I did notice that using Roon in any combination of the above was obviously inferior in SQ to streaming direct from the HQPlayer app on the M1 without Roon. The HQP player interface/functionality is vastly inferior to Roon's, so this was a source of frustration for me. 

Anyway, as an experiment I acquired a second M1 mini (cheapest basic config) and substituted it for the 2012 Mini/Uptone combo. The second M1 mini was run headless like the 2012 Mini, using the same generic cat6 ethernet cable into the Uptone Etherregen switch. 

Roon Server running from the headless M1 mini, with HQPlayer running on the other M1 mini and both connected to the 'A' side of the Etherregen switch with the UltraRendu on the 'B' side of Etherregen, sounds fantastic and indistinguishable from streaming direct to the UR via HQPlayer alone.