Roon changes the music

@audphile1 are you going to be buying a separate streamer? I think I remember that you just used a dac with a network card? So you had to use roon?

@dman777 no. I had aurender n200 that I sold when I got my Meitner MA3i. Preferred Meitner built in streamer. I compared it with Roon and Aurender Conductor, as well as Qobuz Connect. My days of using an expensive outboard streamer are over at least for time being. They bring nothing to the table at least when comparing to Meitner, sound quality wise. UI is better with Roon and jplay as well.
 

I had my Roon Nucleus One off for a week and I was using jplay. I powered it back on earlier and it sounds fine. However, I know this won’t last. The solution is to power it down after each listening session. I can live with that especially when I also have jplay that I can use when Roon poops. 

I’ve listened to Roon on 3 different streamers, including the Grimm MU2, and it always sounds to me like I’m listening to bluetooth or airplay. Sounds very grainy and low resolution. I can’t do it. 

There’s no denying Roon is an attractive UI and a decent organizer, possibly the best but if I am going to impose Roon’s DSP engine and RAAT pipeline on my X1, I might as well use a cheaper streaming system. It’s a compromise too far.

I trialled it, I liked a few things, but when compared to my native use of the X1 there was a noticeable detrimental effect. To a lesser degree Tidal does and to me Quobuz has the least detrimental effect of the non native applications  I have used.

Having accepted they all have flaws. I chose to use Tidal connect for casual listening and music discovery. However, when I really sit down to stream & listen to full albums in a quiet environment, the most immersive and engaging way is Lumin direct. It’s just more revealing, less veiled, more vivid, yet it retains a refinement which I like.

IMHO  these differences at least in Tidal and Quobuz are not night and day and I guess would be much less noticeable if the users system is not particularly revealing but I do believe they would still be easily detectable on most "decent" systems.

As I mentioned above my feelings about Roon have changed completely over the past few weeks. 

Firstly, I have come to the view that however you deal with it, the way Roon works necessarily involves heavy processing that can be detrimental to sound quality. I appreciate that some people are not noticing any difference on their systems. That’s fine and they can enjoy the undoubted functional benefits of Roon. However for me, it completely ruins the listening experience.

Secondly, I don’t value the interface and integration with Qobuz as much as I used to. I have given up Roon Optimised Core Kit, ROCK and moved to Windows and dBpoweramp Asset UPnP as a music server on the same NUC. There was a considerable improvement in sound quality. 

The use of Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC allows this to be set up as a headless server just like ROCK or the Nucleus and the normal constant updates and Microsoft user accounts are avoided. I have found the simpler and familiar alphabetical folder arrangement of the albums in the local library on the Linn App liberating. I can see the masterings of the albums I want listen to clearly not buried by dozens of compilations and greatest hits, etc. If there is something I specifically want to listen to on Qobuz, it is a minor inconvenience to navigate back to the relevant place.

I am not sure why I have been persevering with Roon for all these years. The Windows/UPnP approach is a much better more streamlined experience. I can only presume when I started with Roon, my system was less capable of highlighting the differences in sound quality. Perhaps, I was distracted by Roon’s many other advantages such as multi room, surround capability, etc. 

One more thing it is cheaper. I already had a dBpowdramp licence and Windows LTSC only costs about £40 for ten years. There’s no ongoing annual fee like with Roon. I must have always had doubts because I never took up the Lifetime Subscription offer. Also, I feel less inclined to support Roon now it has been acquired by a big corporation. Not to mention that I was annoyed by the flippant attitude of the guy who dealt with my complaint when they cut off my service without warning a couple of years back.