Sound quality of Roon

@grannyring , I know I am the outlier with my experience but the way you describe Sense over Roon is precisely the inverse of what I hear on my system.  Roon is far more nuanced and detailed and Sense sounds flat by comparison.  I have the Zenith 3, Innuos PhoenixUSB reclocker (feeding my Diablo 300 GRYPHON DAC module), and also a PhoenixNET isolation switch.  If there is a way to make Sense sound better than Roon, I’d love to figure that out!

Ha! Do you use your Innuos as both core and end point? I also use Roon Squeezelite experimental mode for best sound out of Roon. 

Do you disable Roon before going back into Sense? I did the A/B again and Roon just sounds more rough around the edges and not as refined and pure. Interesting.

For most of this millennium I played with different music management software. I had been in IT for over 30 years. Overall, I didn’t find much different in the way they sounded… mostly dependent on the DAC and equipment used. I have had my CDs ripped for more than a dozen years.

I finally bought a dedicated high end streamer, Aurlic Aries G2 and happily removed the computer from my audio system. The Aurlic software was easy to use and left the feeling of having a computer in the loop gone. I was ecstatic. It found my files, and consolidated everything. I went on to find Aurender, a superior sounding streamer… I now own two.

I am really happy to leave my computers in my office and have my audio components perform like self contained audio components. Also, while I recognize this might be a strange criticism given one of my streamers cost $22K (a good deal for the sound quality in my opinion)… $24.99 / month for Ron? It only cost $14.99 for a Qobuz subscription for access to millions of albums. Then there is the fact that you can be sure that in ten years the landscape will be completely changed and Roon is either going to be replaced or embedded in devices.

Anyway, for me. I am really happy to have nothing to do with any software… other than the user interface presented by Aurender. But that is me. I get it if folks like using stuff like roon, I once did.

After a decade or so of budget experimenting with computer audio and using low end devices (Olive, NativVita and laptops) along with a couple of DAC’s that still see use, I purchased a Nucleus (which comes with a year of Roon- which delays the inevitable). Considered the Innous, but was put off by their no-return policy; in contrast to the Nucleus 30 day trial period. The Nucleus/Roon sounded a little more detailed going through the USB Burson DAC. My digital audio epiphany came when I bought a Bricasti M1 MDX with a network card last month. Roon manages output to my main system with the Bricasti as a Roon end connected by ethernet- I’m listening more to that than to my turntable. The Nucleus then went upstairs to serve as core and with output via USB to my Burson DAC as a Roon end. That combo is a bit too "sharp/digital" to my liking but it’s a secondary system in a difficult room. There was a learning curve with Roon as software. It seems to like Windows more than Mac for CD file transfers after ripping to a hard drive. Attaching a hard drive to the Nucleus for CD ripping is slow and glitchy. Qobuz is glitchy also. But with the right DAC, Roon can sound REALLY good. And for synching rooms to the same music output, accross different sound systems, it’s impressive software.