Aurender is finally Roon Ready?!

One thing I can add is that I never listen to vanilla Roon. In every case, there are things that can be done with the DSP to make the sound better (to my ears) including application of convolution filters for specific headphone models, room correction, correction for listening position, and various parametic EQ tweaks to make things sound just right to me (and clearly different from default "flat" DSP) in each case. I use Roon in 6 rooms, on 3 systems, and with 4 different models of headphones. Each of these sound way different without Roon DSP. Now they all sound a lot more similar and "better" to my ears. I target a flat response initially then tweak to personal preference from there. In the case of my good sounding yet highly compromised (on the grand scale of things) desktop system I also invert phase.

So what is it about the Aurender sound that is better? With digital, pretty much anything is possible. What’s the secret sauce? Is it a particular house sound? Is it better in every way? Any tradeoffs? Has anyone attempted to apply Roon DSP to see how things compare then? DSP is one of Roon’s standout features that gives one total control of how things sound. I currently have 15 different custom DSP presets I created in Roon that I use to tweak the sound for each room, listening position, headphone, etc. DSP aside, just having volume leveling on for example makes a big difference in the resulting sound. Many settings in Roon including DSP that can come into play with the sound. Obviously, both are now running on the same hardware so that is the same in both cases.

Playing devil’s advocate, I tend to think any maker of a distinguished high end proprietary system would hesitate to provide an open alternative on their platform that sounds as good or better. Lots of ways to handle that in the software. Just saying. Roon on Aurender is an interesting development for sure. Definitely provides a path to Aurender for existing Roon customers so smart move there.

Is there a streamer that doesn’t sound fantastic with Joseph Audio?