Roon changes the music

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.

@newton_john jplay has a very nice UI. It’s similar to Roon but does not have every feature of Roon. Example of a few features I think would be nice to have -

1. When browsing artist/composer/band albums, the list is sorted by release year descending. Roon gives you an option to sort by popularity which how I would prefer to view it

2. Option to select albums in MQA format. I stream both Qobuz and Tidal. My DAC has full MQA capabilities and happens to sound amazing playing MQA. I think Jplay is a bit odd in this regard. For example Patricia Barber “Clique” album is available in MQA thru Roon. Jplay shows CD quality but plays track 1 as MQA and the rest is 44-16. Roon pulls the entire album in MQA.

3. A bit more info on format would be nice at album level 

However, as I said the interface is really nice and I am extremely happy with the sound quality. 

Marcin from jplay frequents the forums. He posted here https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/jplay-app/post?postid=2910160

Roon is a terrible company with the worst tech support model on the planet