Sound quality of Roon

OP, you should try a free Roon trial and see how it sounds for you.  I now use a combo of Roon and Tidal via my iMac, through an Audioquest Carbon USB wire into my Michi X3.  

Thanks for the additional comments. I am slowly feeling my way through this to figure out what is the best way to try Roon.

@jjs49 your comments were really helpful to my understanding, as always.  I am wondering if you wouldn't mind saying if you were to start now with Roon knowing what you know, and were trying to do it well, meaning good sound, and easy to use, but at lowest cost possible, how would you start?

Some people here seem to post without reading what’s been said earlier. I guess this topic is getting kinda long.

I agree with previous poster, do a trial of Roon.  It's what I did.  You got the BS Node and it can be an endpoint.  Just make sure you got all the piece parts in place so you can eval without having to mess with hardware config during eval period. 

I did not expect Roon to sound great during a trial.  I just wanted it to be responsive, so prior to my trial I installed a 10th gen i7/ssd NUC.  I'm now on the path to approach the listening experience of vinyl.  So, money sump, care with the little stuff..especially anything that reduces power and ethernet noise and improves the timing of the signal feeding my DAC.  Not an easy task when on a budget.  

One of the unexpected benefits I discovered of ROON is that Old SONOS Zone players work as ROON endpoints. These are being aged out by SONOS and don’t work with their new eco system so they can be picked up for cheap. I have seen them on Craigs for a little as $50. I even saw one that had been moded by Wired4Sound for cheap. Of course this is midfi gear but they work great for spinning up systems in a garage, workshop etc. They only handle redbook CD quality but ROON will step the bit rate down if you are streaming higher resolution. Somebody gave me one that didn't work.  I discovered it was the network card was bad but worked fine if hard wired. Ran optical out to a Schiit Modi then to a pair of Audio Engine powered speakers and bad boom descent sounding music for non critical listening pleasure.