Review of Roon Media Player and Server

amirm

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Hi everyone. This is my review of Roon media player. We had a bunch of discussion about it a while back but I did not try it because of the requirement for credit card in advance of evaluation. On insistence of Caelin from Shunyata, I went ahead and signed up. It took all of an hour or two to completely “get” and fall in love with this software.

This review is the highlights of what I find attractive in the software. As some of you know, my team was responsible for building the Windows Media Player which ships in every copy of Windows. Alas that software has been frozen in time for the last decade or so, and does not for a variety of reasons meet the needs of an audiophile or music lover. So with the build of my new server, I decided to go a new route.

I had tried JRiver a couple of years ago and immediately dismissed it. It is a huge piece of software and quite bloated in my view. I know it has immense set of features and I am not giving it a fair review in what I just said :). Having managed the development of another complex player namely Windows Media Player, and seeing how hard it was to keep it reliable and performant, I have learned to heavily appreciate simplicity. I don’t need or want video playback for example. What I need is something that doesn’t mess with all parts of Windows. This will be critical to keeping a PC based system reliable.

Software Architecture
On that end, the best appeal of Roon is not what you see, but what you don’t. Architecturally, this is one superb piece of software. You install one to N copies of the software on every device from PCs to tablets and phones. You then designate one of them as the master librarian that has your audio hardware connected to it.

If you have a display on that computer, you can fully navigate and play your content of course. But the beauty is that you can also do that from any other computer. Sitting my laptop for example, I can start and stop playback of music started by my tablet as it plays out of my music server connected to my main computer.

Importantly, the user interface is identical on all devices. What you see on your Tablet is identical to what you see on your computer. Everything down to changing the setup of the server can be done as if the screen of the tablet is that of the server. In that sense, the tablet interface is not yet another user interface to learn. It is identical to what you see on any other instance of it including the computer.

This is a hard thing to do as you have to build a completely distributed system that is independent of the hardware layers underneath. Other systems start with a PC implementation and then cook up yet another interface for tablets and such. They cannot move their massive software base on the PC over to the tablet. With Roon, this is designed from day one to be this way, recognizing the role of all these devices to be equal to the PC. It is elegant underneath, and on the surface in how you can do everything from every device.

The great architecture does not stop there. The system is highly robust underneath. Things that would easily screw up less-well-written software don’t even make Roon blink. Let me give an example. I built my NAS with my library and pointed Roon to it. Once it had fully cataloged it, I deleted that folder, created a new one with the same name and put a bunch of other albums in there. I think for sure once I fire up Roon, there will be confusion, crashes and such. Nothing like that happened. I watch it as it erases the old albums it had cached and quickly build them up again using the new library. Likewise, all other copies of Roon refreshed themselves as if nothing had happened. I have thrown a bunch of monkey wrenches like this at it and it simply does not care.

As another example, I buy music on my laptop and copy them to my NAS. Then I fire up Roon and it goes through processing the new additions that the main server copy of Roon then uses. Fully parallel, and distributed architecture that makes sure the entire system “state” is never corrupted by multiple instances of it running. And with it, ease of use and not worrying about how the system works. You just do things that come to you naturally and the system accommodates them by design.

Another sign of great design is performance. The user interface is extremely fast no matter what device you use. Screens come up instantaneously. This is especially noticeable on tablets where their slower CPU means the interface on most programs is more sluggish than on the PC. Not so here. Everything is lightning fast.

The only slow down I noticed is when I put my library on a server. Now there is about half a second lag before album art shows up. But the rest of the interface is there very fast.

Roon User Interface/Features
OK, enough theory let’s dig into the features of the software. What is here is not anything terribly exciting until one zooms in:



Let’s play an album now:

Usual stuff shows up like the album cover and name. Not so unusual are audiophile type information seen right below the album cover: “FLAC 44.1 Khz 16bit 2ch.” I just love that. At a glance I can tell if I am playing CD quality audio or high-res. Can’t tell you how often I tell myself, “boy that high-res track sounds good” only to look and see that 44.1/16 bit designation there :).

Other times I am comparing the CD to high-res version and it is fantastic to know which is playing. On that front, if you have two audio interfaces on your computer server as I do with two USB to S/PDIF (and AES/EBU), you can switch between them instantly. You can see what is playing down below which says “Berkeley.” One click on that and you can switch to another device. Very, very cool for making comparisons. That name by the way is what I chose for my Berkeley USB to AES/EBU converter. You can call it anything you want in the settings.

Speaking of settings, clicking on the Berkeley brings that up on any instance of the player:


I am running this again on my laptop so it shows things that exist here like but also networked devices on my main server, i.e. the Berkeley. At any time, you see a composite of all playback devices both on the computer you are typing on, and what is available from servers elsewhere on your network.

As mentioned, you can drill into settings of networked servers/audio devices as well as you can do for your local device. So let’s do that by clicking on Audio Setup:



This is the top part of the menu. The “Private” devices are what are on my laptop. I can share them out if I want but I have not done so. You can see the list of devices which were at one time connected to my laptop such as the Meridian and iFi DACs.

The list in white below that black box are the interfaces shared out by other Roon systems. In this case, my main music server has broadcast its devices that I can also use. One is Berkeley at the bottom using ASIO interface. Others are what is available such as the speakers in my Samsung TV that is the computer monitor for my music server (“Syncmaster”). You can enable them and then they show up as sources you can select with a gear symbol next to them, allowing configuration of each one.

Scrolling down we see the rest of the devices:


The SC-61 is a Pioneer AVR in our living room which has DLNA/UpnP support. I have not tried to output to it be presumably I can.

At the bottom, I can configure DSD to PCM on the fly conversion. My main DAC does not support DSD so it is wonderful to have this feature there and so easy to configure on and off. Various algorithms are offered there with a programmable gain. The default was 6 dB which made DSDs sound louder than equiv. PCM files I have. I dialed it down to 4 dB as you see and that made them sound the same :).

Clicking the gear for Berkeley brings up this super useful dialog:


For every device you can set a limit of maximum sample rate and whether it can play DSD or not. My DAC currently is limited to 96 Khz PCM and no DSD so these features were a godsend. I can now play everything without worrying about the same rate being too high or being DSD files. Roon automatically resamples files above these limits so that they can play. Again, every one of these settings is device specific and can be independently configured for every DAC.

I don’t know about jRiver but compared to Foobar2000, these settings are so easy to configure and put a smile on my face. Another thing that does that is the little “light” next to the track being played. Clicking on it shows a dialog like this:



Purple says the path is completely bit-perfect as indicated by “lossless” designation. The full pipeline is shown for confirmation. Should I play a DSD file, that color changes because Roon will be performing the resampling so what is played is no longer lossless. Most excellent!

Speaking of most excellent, let’s look at the playback bar:


Notice the waveform display at the bottom. I love that as often music starts at very low volume or even silence and I think maybe I didn’t hit play yet. But then see the waveform and can quickly see if a much louder section is to come as to be ready to lower the volume as needed.

Metadata and Sorting
OK, enough tech talk. Let’s look at the features we want to use to enjoy music. Let’s look at a full album detail as we are playing it:



I must say, at first I was dismissive of the rich metadata Roon sports. But as soon as I used the software, I got hooked on reading what they have to say about the artist and the album in question. The first few lines are shown there. If you hit the down arrow, then you get a pop up with the rest of it:



This gets me to a gripe I have which is lack of paragraph breaks. The above is an exception in having one. The rest I have looked at can be a full page with no breaks in sight which makes it hard to read. That aside, they are still enjoyable to read as I listen. There is an author by the way which was at the end but would not fit on the screen so it got cut off in my snapshot.

You have the usual controls of selecting favorites by clicking on the heart icon for both album and tracks. The albums will have two ratings: one provided by the Roon service and one by you.

Back to our original album view, note the rich set of subtags. You can also add anything you want yourself which comes in handy as this rich metadata does not exist for audiophile recordings from likes of Sound Liaison, and Blue Coast Records.

All tags are “hot” of course and clicking on any of them will bring up a menu for that genre. Let’s do that for Jazz:




I am not a Jazz expert so those of you who are have to tell me if those are valid subsegments.



One cool feature is the automatic radio station. When your queue of music you have selected finishes, by default Roon will synthesize a playlist for you that is similar to what you had selected manually:



Now such features have existed forever. Roon analyzes your music when you import them and based on that and subtags (I think) will create a playlist that more than once I have confused to be part of my original album! It is that good. In that sense, you can prime the pump with one album and then have the system take over entertaining you for the type of music you are in a mood to listen.

Similar to this is the “Discover” tab in the main menu which brings up this type of output:



Roon is remarkable in finding things in my library that I then play. Not sure what logic it is using but whatever it is, it is quite effective when you are indecisive as to what to play next. It has especially come in handy as of late when I have been buying way more music than I have had time to play.

Other thoughtful features abound. See for example this history that shows up when you hit the same button in the main UI:



Again, a great help if you are buying a lot of music and want to go back to something you played yesterday but don’t remember the name. Click on any and it will play that track.

Similarly, any view of the interface can be bookmarked and then you can go there with one click:


Here I had named this place as “Test” and clicking on it got me there. I can add, rename and delete bookmarks using the same interface.

Creating playlists and such are totally intuitive:


Misses
No software is perfect of course and there are a few things that are negatives:

1. The software is expensive. iTunes/WMP are free and Jriver just $50. I paid $450 for a paid up license for Roon. I am a stingy guy and takes a lot for me to fork over that kind of money. I did it for two reasons: one, I like to support development of such superb software. And two, I find the software critical to enjoyment of my music library that costs way, way more than this. Metadata licenses for rich data you see in Roon are expensive to license unfortunately and that is the cost that we bear when we sign up for them this way.

2. Scroll bars are tiny and invisible unless you hover over the right margin. Many times I wondered where the rest of the UI was only to realize that I could scroll down them. The dark blue scroll bar is almost invisible against the dark background of the interface. I like the elegance of it disappearing but it reduces discoverability by a mile so I think it should be fixed.

Also need fixing is that if you move the mouse outside of the window, the scroll bar no longer functions even though you are still holding down the mouse button.

3. The search function is not phonetic. Searching for Muddy Watters but spelling the first word as “ModdY” gets you nothing:


Many international titles have characters that are difficult to type in using US keyboards. Having phonetic search is essential there and easy technology to deploy.

4. By far the most annoyance is this. There is no fast way to play an album. Saying you want to do that in the UI, always brings up this second dialog:



You have to click again on “Play Now.” There should be a button on the main UI that does that without having to do it again for such a common operation.

5. The software uses significant amount of CPU cycles if you let the little progress bar run at the bottom. I am talking 5% or so. Hiding that gets the CPU usage to essentially zero. I am unclear why it take so much CPU cycles just to show that moving tick. There is no practical impact there but for a software with such beautiful architectural design, this is a miss.

Summary
Roon is an elegantly architected and highly functional music playback system targeted toward music lovers that are audiophiles. It is fast, and designed by people who truly understand how people like us want our software to operate. Little touches are everywhere that put a smile on your face in this regard. While pricier than other competitors, Roon has my highest level recommendation for a media player. And it is what I use every day for my music enjoyment.

P.S. I have no commercial interest or connection to the company. The review are my own opinion formed during the free trial and after purchasing the software.
 

marty

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Apr 20, 2010
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Amir,
Thanks for a very informative review. I am currently in complete agonization mode having evaluated JRiver, Audirvana, and Pure Music over the past few weeks.

Some background: I have been using my iTunes music library quite satisfactorily to play my files with Pure Music without incident. But I recently received an external drive with some DSD files on it which creates a problem for me. All I really want to do is use a music player that will play DSD files from my external hard drive, however ideally I'd like to put my iTunes library on the same drive. That's not a problem as you probably know. The problem is that my iTunes library is organized by playlists and there doesn't seem to be any program out there that will allow me to import an iTunes playlist that is somehow usable with the player of choice.

I can of course use my iTunes library with Pure Music as I am doing (Audirvana might be better sonically once I figure out how to set the damn thing up! I am closer today than I was yesterday). Perhaps more importantly, I want to migrate away from Pure Music because it doesn't have a iPad App. Rather, one has to use a screen sharing program such as Apple Remote or Team Viewer to make selections using one's iPad and most screen sharing programs are horribly sluggish and unresponsive. JRiver does allows me to play my DSD files from my external drive, but again, I cannot import an iTunes playlist.

Since Audirvana and Pure Music both ride in top of iTunes, a perfect solution would be if someone wrote a software code to get either of those programs to play from an iTunes based playlist. That's the essential issue and so my question is whether Roon will allow me to that?

Of interest, if you go on the JRiver forum, the ability to import iTunes playlists seems to be one of the most commonly asked questions over the past few years, but nobody has an answer as far as I know. Let me be clear. I know I can probably rebuild my playlists individually, but that is just not an attractive option for me as it would really be way too time consuming. So I'm left to wonder: Is there some script that somebody has written for ANY of those 3 programs that would allow this to be accomplished successfully?

One last thing. I can in fact export my playlists to an M3U text file and import them to JRiver. But when I select them, nothing happens because the playlists are not populated with files. Here again, I'm told I can populate them individually, but in fact, that would be a huge undertaking that I'm frankly not interested in doing. I can in fact export my playlists to an M3U text file and import them to JRiver. But when I select them, nothing happens because the playlists are not populated with files. Here again, I'm told I can populate them individually, but in fact, that would be a huge undertaking that I'm frankly not interested in doing.

Thanks again for your thoughtful review of Roon.
Marty

PS I've heard Roon works better when you plug in an AQ Jitterbug heh,heh,heh..... :)
 

amirm

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Hi Marty. You may be in luck as a quick search shows direct support of iTunes library and playlists in Roon!!! https://community.roonlabs.com/t/how-do-i-import-my-itunes-library/120/33

From my read, you don't have to export anything. And syncing happens continuously. About as nice as it can get if that is so.

Give it a try and if it doesn't work, I am sure the roon guys will fix it. They are exceptionally responsive to their user base.

As to AQ Jitterbug, you rascal. :D
 

Andre Marc

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Until the day it is not tethered to a host computer, and is a free standing control app, or light DLNA server that can be installed on a NAS, I will pass. No consumer grade computers are near my reference system.
 

asiufy

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I've suggested Marty give Roon a try as well. You can run it alongside iTunes, and everything will sync up.
Then, once iTunes is synced with Roon, you can point Roon to the DSD files on the external drive. That way you can have both collections in one place. And if you factor in Tidal as well, you can have everything in one place!
I do agree with Andre that streamers are much better in terms of SQ, but I believe it's only a matter of time before Roon is built into proper streamers (Auralic has signed up already), so I thought I'd get a head start and move away from iTunes as a cataloguing tool, and switched to Roon.
 

amirm

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I have built a PC go with this. Audio performance is excellent to these old ears :). Before that I used the Oppo as a streamer and its interface on tablets was beyond primitive and awful.
 

marty

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Apr 20, 2010
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... I thought I'd get a head start and move away from iTunes as a cataloguing tool, and switched to Roon.

Alex and Amir
I may get there eventually. Now that I have some time on the clock with these programs, I can see a strategy taking shape. My current preference for DSD, 2xDSD, WAV is Audirvana. It really does sound slightly better than Pure Music or JRiver. For Pandora and my iTunes library which has mostly redbook with some hi rez PCM, and MP3, Pure Music is wonderful because of its upsampling capabilities for Pandora and mp3. (Audirvana doesn't upsample but that might actually be preferred). I know I'm in the minority here but my experience is that upsampling does not automatically mean it sounds better than the native configuration. Most times its a trade-off without a clear winner. If I never saw JRiver again, it would be too soon. Very frustrating to tame it due to a bad user interface. It is also slow to engage operations. I wanted to shoot it after 2 days of pretty intensive use. Had to up my Prozac to function again in the real world.

The biggest issue with all of these is really comes down to this- how do you like to manage your music and will they allow you to do it that way? Audirvana has some reasonable abilities but honestly, good old iTunes is the best at management and their "genius" feature is excellent- it truly seems to "get" the DNA of the music, much like Pandora. "Genius" is to my library what Pandora is the the world library and I tend to use Genius regularly to make novel playlists from my library.

I'm sticking with Audirvana and will work on customizing it for me (i.e.classification and sorting preferences using custom playlists) which is doable even for a non-techie like me. What is also VERY nice is that it can also switch back to iTunes integration mode within the program so I can use my iTunes and genius playlists fairly easily.

All in all, its a bit cumbersome switching between 2 programs (Audirvana and Pure Music) and 4 sources (Macbook iTunes Library, NAS drive, Tidal and Pandora) but its doable and in fact everything sounds good to pretty darned good indeed. Audirvana really is the discovery of the week, at least for me. A sonic sweetheart, especially for DSD and higher.

Still gotta figure out how to restore cover art pretty easily as its not worth spending that much time on it. (Too busy reading player instruction manuals! Ha!) It sounds like Roon might be the best management program coming down the pike. I'll keep an eye on it. In the meantime, has anyone compared it to Audirvana sonically for high bit rate files and if so, please share your thoughts. I figure that if it originally came out of the house of Meridian, it's gotta be pretty decent, yes?
Marty
 

caesar

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May 30, 2010
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Hi Amir,

Great write-up! I like how you have interspersed text and pictures. Very professional!

A couple of questions:

- Who is this product really targeted for? Some guys will obviously run it off their everyday computer (laptop/ desktop), but most audiophiles will do (almost) anything to improve the sound. So most have probably moved from their "regular computer" to

(1) a custom computer turned into a music server if they have the "inner geek", or

(2) to a third party streamer (Naim, Aurender, or dozens of others), if they are not "geeks" and would rather listen to music than play with computers.

So seems like this product is targeted to a fairly small number of guys who are not crazy about optimizing their system and will run it off their computer with everything else on it potentially degrading sonic performance, or the "geeks" segment (and I mean that respectfully, as in "geeks will rule the world")

- How extensible is the architecture? You mention quality architecture, yet is the architecture in place to integrate with streamers such as Naim, Aurender, and others? I would tend to think most people are not "geeks" and will go this route, so the streamer segment is where the business action/ money will be. If Roon is serious, they probably want to integrate with these, or do they?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
 

asiufy

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caesar,

Their target audience is, AFAIK, everyone.
The architecture, as Amir touched briefly, is very open and extensible. They've introduced a concept called RoonSpeakers. This is a bit of code that manufacturers will be able to license and implement in their own products, so you'll be able to "target" Roon to those particular devices. So, Naim, Auralic, Aurender, etc. could have a device that will play streams from a Roon install in your NAS, controlled by your iPad, for instance. This is where I understand they want to take the product.
Of course, people with simpler setups and simpler needs will still be able to hook up any ol' computer to a DAC.
 

Andre Marc

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caesar,

Their target audience is, AFAIK, everyone.
The architecture, as Amir touched briefly, is very open and extensible. They've introduced a concept called RoonSpeakers. This is a bit of code that manufacturers will be able to license and implement in their own products, so you'll be able to "target" Roon to those particular devices. So, Naim, Auralic, Aurender, etc. could have a device that will play streams from a Roon install in your NAS, controlled by your iPad, for instance. This is where I understand they want to take the product.
Of course, people with simpler setups and simpler needs will still be able to hook up any ol' computer to a DAC.

Except here it the problem..manufacturers will have to pay Roon to make their file players compatible., making the cost of products go up, be under their heel when updates occur,

Oh, wait, sounds iike dealing with Apple, and to a lesser extent, MS.

The best way to do things is to have universal compatibility. My Bryston runs on Linux, with custom firmware, and it can be controlled by dozens of apps, half of them free.

Roon will not add anything sonically unless run on a foxxconn off the assembly line computer, it will not improve the sound of a NAS.

And Roon speakers? An interesting concept. But most folks are already invested in speakers. This may appeal to someone starting from the ground up.
The Meridian networked speakers were a massive bomb. My dealer had demos he could not even give away. They did sound very good IMO however.

Playing devil's advocate here.
 

asiufy

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Andre,

I suggest you read up on what I wrote, as you got it all wrong :D In spite of the name, "RoonSpeakers" have nothing to do with actual speakers (I don't like the name either). It's a replacement for UPNP/DLNA. And guess what? There are no royalties, so the Apple comparison doesn't entirely apply either.

Sure, RoonSpeaker tech won't be "open" in the sense that UPNP is. But Apple has proven that "open" isn't necessarily better. UPNP itself is a nightmare, and had to be revised/extended by Linn with OpenHome to become even remotely useable. The kicker is that Roon won't be charging people to implement their UPNP-like tech (RoonSpeakers) on their devices. A number of manufacturers have already signed up, chief among them Auralic, dCS, Elac, Meridian and PS Audio. And that's even before Roon published a single line of code! They signed up on the strenght of the idea alone...

If you're happy with your Bryston, with custom Linux, good for you. Since it runs Linux, Bryston might implement RoonSpeakers, and you'll be able to use Roon to control it, instead of Bryston's app. I find UPNP control apps, all of them, mediocre at best. The only one that was remotely useable was Auralic's, but they stopped supporting third-party devices in UPNP a while ago...

I don't know your Bryston, but today, you can improve the sound of your NAS by avoiding UPNP altogether, and using regular network file sharing with your streamer. Don't know if your Bryston supports that, but Auralic, Aurender and Antipodes do. Sounds massively better, with far less hiccups.


alex
 

caesar

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May 30, 2010
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caesar,

Their target audience is, AFAIK, everyone.
The architecture, as Amir touched briefly, is very open and extensible. They've introduced a concept called RoonSpeakers. This is a bit of code that manufacturers will be able to license and implement in their own products, so you'll be able to "target" Roon to those particular devices. So, Naim, Auralic, Aurender, etc. could have a device that will play streams from a Roon install in your NAS, controlled by your iPad, for instance. This is where I understand they want to take the product.
Of course, people with simpler setups and simpler needs will still be able to hook up any ol' computer to a DAC.

Thanks! That is good news.

Now I wonder how long it will take them and if the economics to license their product to third parties will make sense for everyone.
 

caesar

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May 30, 2010
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Another Roon questions for the experts:

For those of us who value high res vinyl rips as the best format and have files such as "Henry Allen - World on a String.wav", with no identifying metadata, is Roon smart enough to figure out the artist and album just from the file name? Or can a rule possibly be set up to help it parse these titles to include this Henry Allen album in the jazz/ blues library?

If not, is it possible to manually add metadata in windows (or mac) to a plain WAV file?

And can Roon categorizations be tweaked by the consumer? For example if Roon thinks of the above album as jazz, but you prefer to think of it as blues, can you make the change?

Thanks!
 

caesar

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May 30, 2010
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Gentlemen,

Another thought: if the third party streamer guys choose not to incorporate Roon directly, will Roon architecture be able to "work around" them and sell something directly to the consumer?
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
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Seattle, WA
Hi Amir,

Great write-up! I like how you have interspersed text and pictures. Very professional!
Thanks. It takes some work to write these but I think being so long, it aids in people actually reading them.

A couple of questions:

- Who is this product really targeted for? Some guys will obviously run it off their everyday computer (laptop/ desktop), but most audiophiles will do (almost) anything to improve the sound. So most have probably moved from their "regular computer" to

(1) a custom computer turned into a music server if they have the "inner geek", or

(2) to a third party streamer (Naim, Aurender, or dozens of others), if they are not "geeks" and would rather listen to music than play with computers.

So seems like this product is targeted to a fairly small number of guys who are not crazy about optimizing their system and will run it off their computer with everything else on it potentially degrading sonic performance, or the "geeks" segment (and I mean that respectfully, as in "geeks will rule the world")
It supports multiple modes of operation as long as the final component is a computer to run Roon (in a couple of months there will be embedded versions/appliances from ELAC so you don't have to build a PC).

In my case, I initially started testing it with music being on my laptop. But of course did not want to connect and disconnect it all the time. So I built a custom music server with no fans and put my library on a NAS. This is a very common mode of operation with people building fully souped up audiophile PC music servers as for example Mike Lavigne has done.

I like the option of a computer because then I have a number of choices for auto-eq for room correction and such. I am not sure you can get such things for dedicated streamers but someone who knows better can correct me.

I personally don't think I am leaving any performance on the table in using a very high-performance USB to AES/EBU bridge (Berkeley Alpha) with using a PC.

- How extensible is the architecture? You mention quality architecture, yet is the architecture in place to integrate with streamers such as Naim, Aurender, and others? I would tend to think most people are not "geeks" and will go this route, so the streamer segment is where the business action/ money will be. If Roon is serious, they probably want to integrate with these, or do they?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
I have not ventured there but as you can see, it is showing my streaming cable device, i.e. my AVR on the list of output options available. So it seems possible to run Roon against them but again, I have not tried it.
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
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Seattle, WA
Gentlemen,

Another thought: if the third party streamer guys choose not to incorporate Roon directly, will Roon architecture be able to "work around" them and sell something directly to the consumer?
The protocols for streams is mostly standardized. So integration with them is not difficult. I did a search for Squeezbox which has its own tweaks and seems like they are working on supporting it: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/squeezebox-support/1043/104
 

Andre Marc

Member Sponsor
Mar 14, 2012
3,970
7
0
San Diego
www.avrev.com
Andre,

I suggest you read up on what I wrote, as you got it all wrong :D In spite of the name, "RoonSpeakers" have nothing to do with actual speakers (I don't like the name either). It's a replacement for UPNP/DLNA. And guess what? There are no royalties, so the Apple comparison doesn't entirely apply either.

Sure, RoonSpeaker tech won't be "open" in the sense that UPNP is. But Apple has proven that "open" isn't necessarily better. UPNP itself is a nightmare, and had to be revised/extended by Linn with OpenHome to become even remotely useable. The kicker is that Roon won't be charging people to implement their UPNP-like tech (RoonSpeakers) on their devices. A number of manufacturers have already signed up, chief among them Auralic, dCS, Elac, Meridian and PS Audio. And that's even before Roon published a single line of code! They signed up on the strenght of the idea alone...

If you're happy with your Bryston, with custom Linux, good for you. Since it runs Linux, Bryston might implement RoonSpeakers, and you'll be able to use Roon to control it, instead of Bryston's app. I find UPNP control apps, all of them, mediocre at best. The only one that was remotely useable was Auralic's, but they stopped supporting third-party devices in UPNP a while ago...

I don't know your Bryston, but today, you can improve the sound of your NAS by avoiding UPNP altogether, and using regular network file sharing with your streamer. Don't know if your Bryston supports that, but Auralic, Aurender and Antipodes do. Sounds massively better, with far less hiccups.


alex
alex, here is what is confusing, I do understand RoonSpeaker is a protocol.but from what I understand, and correct me if I am wrong, Roon IS going to make advanced active speakers as well?

Moving on..to address your points and answer a few questions..

FYI, I have used UPNP without OpenHome for years with zero issues. I have tested over 50 streamers in my system from a lowly Squeezebox to five figure models from Plinius,etc. some with internal hard drives, some without, some with internal DACs, some without. etc. I have never had hiccups of any kind via DLNA/UPNP. None.

If Bryston starts to support RoonSpeakers, I will jump on board. They continually add features based on user feedback..for instance..users were asking about Tidal, and now it was added to the current beta firmware. I think Audionet and Linn Kazoo are terrific apps, but YMMV.

Bryston does support regular network file sharing, but there is absolutely no sonic difference at all. And as a matter of fact it is far more kludgey. When the file hits the unit, it is either rendered by the internal soundcard or processed via MPD and sent to the DAC. The player has no idea how the file got there, whether by locally attached storage, via ethernet/DLNA or ethernet/file sharing. Your statement is 100% subjective as far as being massively better.

In the end my opinion and those show share it, that Roon has an uphill battle, is meaningless because the market will speak. If it works, is a big improvement logistically and ergonomically over current systems..I am ALL FOR IT! But as you know..high end audio is filled with unfulfilled promises..
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
Another Roon questions for the experts:

For those of us who value high res vinyl rips as the best format and have files such as "Henry Allen - World on a String.wav", with no identifying metadata, is Roon smart enough to figure out the artist and album just from the file name? Or can a rule possibly be set up to help it parse these titles to include this Henry Allen album in the jazz/ blues library?

If not, is it possible to manually add metadata in windows (or mac) to a plain WAV file?
There is no need to edit the wav file. Roon has its own database of tags it uses once it has imported your file. For files with no metadata, it just picks a default cover art and shows the file names as track names. You can however edit these. To the extent your album is something that exists in Roon's music online metadata library, the formatting is trivial. YOu just click on the little pen symbol on the album page (to the right) and it gives you a chance to type in the name of the album and it will show you everything that it matches. Here I tried to do that with some of my wav files which were from AIX records:



In my case no match was found since AIX record album is actually a blu-ray and not in Roon. But if it were there, it could have found it and with one click populate its local database and you would be done.

It is a shame that it won't detect a signature of the music and do that automatically as we did in Windows Media Player (i.e. what Shazam does).

And can Roon categorizations be tweaked by the consumer? For example if Roon thinks of the above album as jazz, but you prefer to think of it as blues, can you make the change?

Thanks!
Yes, every field can be modified that you see in the interface by clicking on the same "pen" icon above except that when there is a known album, you get all of its data. Here is the part that lets you change tags:



Simply uncheck the genre it has picked and put in your own.
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
FYI, I have used UPNP without OpenHome for years with zero issues. I have tested over 50 streamers in my system from a lowly Squeezebox to five figure models from Plinius,etc. some with internal hard drives, some without, some with internal DACs, some without. etc. I have never had hiccups of any kind via DLNA/UPNP. None.
Wow, that is remarkable. We supported UpnP in Windows Media Player and it was nothing but grief on the device side. It was so bad that we thought about releasing our own stack for device guys to assure reliability.

At RMAF I asked a company who was very proud of the fact that they had added streaming functionality about reliability and got an earful. He said they were forced into doing it because of market pressure but that it was not at all a reliable protocol.
 

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