To Roon or not to Roon?

I switched to Roon about a month ago and have been totally delighted.  I went with a Roon Nucleus paired with an IFi Zen Streamer as the Roon endpoint... all for less than $2K.

I tried Roon on my MAC Mini  as a trial.  Didn't like the setup with all the MAC updates and the flaky behavior of my old Mac Mini (slow).  I work with DB servers as a living and have affinity for dedicated hardware.  So I jumped in with both feets and got a SGC ST and bought a year subscription of The ROONs and switch my Bryston Pi to an Roon Ready.  At first the SQ of my little Bryston BDP-pi and MPD was better.  But after network tweaks I got Roon really close.   I was on the fence about keeping ROON but when I realized SONOS connects can be endpionts I decided to keep it. I even had a W4S moded connect that actually sounds purdy good for being as old as it is.   People are  dumping the old connects left and right for dirt cheap.  I put one on a desktop and in the garage. I fired up the Roon app on my old mac mini and realized it recognized the little Audio Engine headphone DAC/amp I had connected to it so now I can stream directly to that via ROON.  Hell, I can even stream back to the iPAD that I use to control it with, crazy.   I suppose the Roon app will see audio output devices where its running. 

Little clip of the iPAD functioning as the Roon controller and Endpoint.

Qobuz-->RoonCore--iPAD-USB-24/192-->DAC-->AudioEngine

Roon doesn't interface with the ap.  Roon will see your Auralic and you will control it with roon.   Or you can control it with the ap. But they are seperate.

There is no difference in the sound, they are just different ways of commanding your streamer to send the digital files to your DAC.

Jerry

taken a step towards using Roon. I've bought an old Intel Nuc with 8Gb Ram and a 128Gb SSD drive.