Roon changes the music

I don’t use Roon.  I’ve certainly read over the years complaints that it degrades sound.  It’s interesting that experienced listeners disagree 

@newton_john the streamer card in my DAC is upnp compatible. I didn’t have to do anything special. If you use anything in between jplay and linn I’m not sure how that may impact sound quality. 

People will spend years tweaking and optimizing their analog setup but expect digital to work optimally right at the outset.  Digital needs some work just as analog does!

There are many things that frustrate me about Roon: flakiness and instability/slow downs, that the team leverages the user base as QC, the awful forum moderation and groupthink, and more than a little stubbornness when it comes to what users versus their product people want to see done. Sound quality hasn’t been one of them. 

One thing people generally don’t disclose in their discussion of Roon sound quality is what they have feeding their DAC.  Roon recommends a reasonably powerful server feeding PCM via LAN to a very quiet low powered endpoint.  

So many people have these overbuilt audio servers feeding their DACs. It costs a lot to insulate these powerful machines...and it’s unnecessary if you take Roon’s advice. 

Not saying that accounts for everyone’s difference of opinion.  Just that to have a conversation about sound quality, we need to know the configuration. 

I use 6 and 8 core Roon servers with plenty of RAM and a very quiet Linux fanless N100 with a 20W laptop PSU as a streamer, and that works very well.  The streamer endpoint is where the difference is made:  no moving parts, very little energy, enough processing power. 

I always enjoy learning what different people hear.  I used Roon on a dedicated headless NUC, no DSP, no auto-leveling, and no other do-dads for close to 10 years.  I played it through a pretty good stereo system and really enjoyed the sound…a lot. The stereo was almost always playing at least in the background. The last Roon update wouldn’t run on my NUC ☹️, so it went to computer heaven.  I have Qobuz and Tidal, and I prefer Qobuz for sound quality.  I have since been using Qobuz Connect and Mosaic (I have a dCS dac), and neither is even close to the sound I got from Roon running on the NUC. The stereo sounds like a high quality radio now and is rarely on.  
 

I’ve since heard a demo of a really high end Innuos streamer which played Qobuz better than I’ve ever heard before!!  I’ve decided to get a good (but not the really high end one $$$!!!) Innuos and am waiting for it to arrive.  I a, really wanting my awesome stereo back.

@audphile1 

Thank you.

AI tells me that Bubble UPnP Server won’t make a significant difference to sound quality because it does very little beyond making jPlay compatible with Linn’s protocol. Basically, it is just changing a small bit of code. I don’t think I’ve got anything to lose by trying it out. The worst thing that can happen is it may not be as stable as UPnP and the Linn App. If I don’t like it, I can easily uninstall it and get back to where I am now.
 

Have you taken a view on jPlay yet? Does it have most of the functionality of Roon.