They are also also adding Roon to firmware hopefully by the end of the yearI don’t know Roon or Roon Labs much, but I do see they have Roon Remote app for Android. Not being a Roon Core owner, all I get is a "Looking for Roon Core" pulser in the UX. From what I could see it appears way, way more polished than the Micromega app for Android (no surprise).
The little I’ve read/seen about Roon Core suggests it has a slick UX, lots of tagging/cataloging/library features including access to a jumbo-size metadata collection, some nice integration with music services (esp. Tidal) and endpoints (amps/dacs/playback devices), the usual commodity streaming/playback features you’ll find on lots of other apps like this, and some ’trophy’ features like MQA transcoding, DSD support and maybe some others.
Best I can tell there’s no credible, empirical data or experiments in the literature that demonstrate Roon Core produces ’better’ output than any one of a number of other playback apps - including free ones. Whether it ’sounds’ better to someone, well, that by definition is subjective. $119/yr or $499/lifetime is a bit dear, given what one gets and what I value. Relative to the alternatives out there, both paid and free, I might consider it at half that price.
I am grateful to the Roon Labs COO for obliquely dismissing some of the industry hype around ’audiophile cables’ (in this case ethernet cables), here: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/validity-of-audiophile-ethernet-cables/30251/25.
A mildly bold move: biting a finger on the hand that feeds them, as it were.