Aurender is finally Roon Ready?!

So what is it about the Aurender sound that is better? With digital, pretty much anything is possible. What’s the secret sauce? Is it a particular house sound? Is it better in every way? Any tradeoffs? Has anyone attempted to apply Roon DSP to see how things compare then? DSP is one of Roon’s standout features that gives one total control of how things sound. I currently have 15 different custom DSP presets I created in Roon that I use to tweak the sound for each room, listening position, headphone, etc. DSP aside, just having volume leveling on for example makes a big difference in the resulting sound. Many settings in Roon including DSP that can come into play with the sound. Obviously, both are now running on the same hardware so that is the same in both cases.

Playing devil’s advocate, I tend to think any maker of a distinguished high end proprietary system would hesitate to provide an open alternative on their platform that sounds as good or better. Lots of ways to handle that in the software. Just saying. Roon on Aurender is an interesting development for sure. Definitely provides a path to Aurender for existing Roon customers so smart move there.

@mapman When you use the Conductor app the data stream flows thru the Aurender proprietary processing of the data stream that includes a large SSD cache where the final music files are stored for playback (around 250gb).
This is similar to playing back physical media except it’s even better - there are no moving parts. End result is a digital signal that is as clean as possible that is sent to the external DAC.
Using Roon turns the Aurender into a Roon end point and bypasses all Aurender processing done by the OS. I have heard similar differences when I owned Auralic streamer. The Auralic LDS sounded better than Roon. Auralic also uses caching, just not to the same extent as Aurender.
The difference isn’t difficult to hear, as I mentioned.

Here’s another downside, not for me but will be for some…if you have DSD files in your Roon library, they will be downsampled for the Aurender. Not an issue for me since I mounted the library on SSD inside the N200. Just wanted to bring that up.

Once again though, this is an awesome addition despite the slight degradation in sound quality.

I will include my roon device settings…

Fixed Volume, Volume Leveling Off, Clock Priority 1(Highest), MQA disabled. 
DSP disabled. 

One thing I can add is that I never listen to vanilla Roon. In every case, there are things that can be done with the DSP to make the sound better (to my ears) including application of convolution filters for specific headphone models, room correction, correction for listening position, and various parametic EQ tweaks to make things sound just right to me (and clearly different from default "flat" DSP) in each case. I use Roon in 6 rooms, on 3 systems, and with 4 different models of headphones. Each of these sound way different without Roon DSP. Now they all sound a lot more similar and "better" to my ears. I target a flat response initially then tweak to personal preference from there. In the case of my good sounding yet highly compromised (on the grand scale of things) desktop system I also invert phase.

...if you have DSD files in your Roon library, they will be downsampled for the Aurender.if you have DSD files in your Roon library, they will be downsampled for the Aurender.

I have a couple DSD256 recordings downloaded. Roon settings limit to DSD128. When I played those DSD256 files via Roon on the Aurender N30SA, my DAC’s display showed DSD256. I don’t know what was happening there, but I assume the DAC was displaying the file it was receiving. Why the discrepancy, I have no idea.