Roon vs Qobuz Connect

@debrajray 

What can I do to have my QC cake and eat it too? I’d love to hear about any clever tweaks to imitate Roon’s capabilities, while keeping QC quality. 

you need to optimize your Roon setup and it will beat Qobuz Connect. Roon is not an aggregator. It’s a music database management system with ridiculously good UI, advanced DSP and flexibility to access your local library and display all versions of album with incredible amount of information about artists, recording and sound engineering, etc.

It’s not difficult to get Roon to perform at its highest level. Need the right components and cables to properly configure it. Again, it’s not very hard to get right. 

It still stands to reason that Qobuz Connect can (should) sound better. When using it the stream goes directly to the QC enabled streamer, instead of coming in from Qobuz and making another hop first from the Roon server to the Roon-enabled streamer.

I agree that the Roon user experience is vastly superior to anything Qobuz has to offer, but I still thought that QC sounded slightly better when I had a streamer that supported it. However, I chose to sacrifice the marginal improvement for Roon’s UI. QC controller software was just too frustrating to get along with in the long run. I no longer have a QC enabled streamer and don’t miss it, but I don’t think Roon ever sounded better or as good. Close enough though for the improved overall experience.

In addition to the previously mentioned ways to improve Roon sound, 

'only play one zone at a time'.

@dwette "Now I have no choice but to use Roon."

I think you do have choices.  I think you can use UPnP for free with mconnect or use JPLAY which is not free but many think sounds better than mconnect.

unless I misunderstood your statement.....

@boulder_bob yes, that’s right, and I mentioned in an earlier post  here that UPnP is also supported. I already used Roon for years though, and that’s by far my best option compared to UPnP.

I tried Audirvana briefly (I have a 3-month trial) and decided the user experience is terrible, compared to Roon. I found no advantage to using it otherwise anyway.