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?
Thanks all for the comments and suggestions. Airplay delivers Red Book spec. That’s what turned the corner for me since most of my 1500 or so CDs are “Regular” CDs. My small collection of SACDs I still spin in my Marantz Blu-ray player. Relative to the post, my AB tests were against CDs in my collection vs streamed by Roon. Agreed that poor remastering is what causes bad sound. Amazon is not the culprit- just the delivery method. Interesting post… |
@zgas-music No, Amazon’s not doing you any favors either. Steve Stone did a comparison of the major streaming services in TAS not all that long ago, and let’s just say Amazon did not fare well. Qobuz is your friend for sound quality. |
@theaudiomaniac Fair point. |
First started out with a Roon Core running on an iMAC and using a Bryston BDP as endpoint then into my DAC. Bryston Manic Moose uses MPD and it sounded better than Roon when I took Roon out of the system. Then I moved the Core to a SGC ST and hard wired that to a Velop Mesh node as well as the Bryston. Also upgraded the network cables now the Roon/Qobuz combo are so close to the Bryston/Qobuz combo I just run Roon. If I really want to listen critically I switch the Bryston to MPD mode but most of the time now I can not discern a difference. Same with playing FLAC files off attached storage on the BDP. Its nice having an endpoint that can quickly switch between native and Roon ready. BDP MPD switch is a snap. |
