I agree about letting hardware and software companies do what they do best. My understanding is that it’s expensive and time consuming to develop music management software, meaning it adds significantly to the cost of a component whose company has done this for its hardware, like dCS that I own (and Aurender and plenty of others). Why not leave it to the range of good software options available in the marketplace, like Antipodes does, and either lower the price of components or put the software development money into sound quality? Anyway... Owning a dCS Rossini with its Mosaic software, and subscribing to Roon, I can compare the two. (A good while back I owned Aurender and thought its Conductor app was pretty good, although I'd still go with Roon.) dCS’s Mosaic software is ok, and if it was all I had, I could live with it. SQwise, it occasionally seems slightly better than Roon, but not significantly so. I prefer Roon (I subscribe to Tidal and Qobuz) and use it most of the time. It has significantly more functionality, more information, and greater ease of use. As for reliability, I use Mosaic seldom enough that I can’t comment on this aspect for it, but I can say I’ve had my fair share of annoying problems with Roon, dropouts, missing metadata, connection problems (the dreaded Remote Connection screen). That being said, these problems have improved a lot since I bought a dedicated router (Netgear R7000), possibly illustrating what I’ve been told about such problems, which is that they are more likely a problem with the ISP (I have Comcast) rather than Roon. As for how I use Roon, I stream (nearly my exclusive way of listening) from my Comcast modem, hardwired by CAT 7 ethernet cable to a dedicated router that is ethernet wired (Blue Jeans CAT 6) to a Roon core, for which I am using an Antipodes DX3, which is ethernet wired to my dCS (Roon Ready) Rossini DAC, then going into a preamp, etc. (I won’t take up the issue of desirability or not of using a preamp rather than powering the amp directly from the streamer or DAC, other than saying my Rossini does a pretty or very good job by itself powering the amps.) I use an iPad Air 2 to control Roon. To sum up, to me the presence or absence of a component’s coming with its own software would be very secondary (if not undesirable for reasons stated above) since I prefer Roon, but I suppose it could be a consideration budgetwise for someone wanting to avoid the additional monthly cost of Roon and the streaming services.
Jim Heckman
Jim Heckman