Roon Streaming Service actually Degrades the sound


The purpose of this post is to put pressure on the Roon engineers

to make Roon a better product. How do I know Roon is less than ideal?

From a streamer maker who has the highest standards and 

consequently refuses to go the Roon route. As he put it "I experiment with

my prototype and eliminate everything which holds the best sound back".

Sad to say he rejected Roon for exactly this reason.

I use Roon and do not want to learn a different, worse program.

Hence I want Roon to get better. Anyone listening Roon Folk?

 

 

chorus

I recently added a roon nucleus, switching from mconnectHD, streaming from Qobuz to my Bricasti DAC. There is no question that roon sounds different - and according to my sensibilities WORSE: muffled, with a loss of detail, ambiance, and nuance. I am not a happy camper.

I’ll add my $.02.

It would appear to be equipment dependent. In my case, I was a subscriber to Roon and, out of curiosity, tried streaming the same file using Lighting DS (Auralic’s software).  I dropped Roon the same day.  Incidentally, I was running Roon Core on a higher end Mac Mini solely dedicated to it with a solid state drive and 16GB ram.  I wasn’t using Roon to upsample or process in any way - it was a true straight shoot out. If I had been, perhaps I would have gotten different results.  Regardless, the reduction in sound quality was unacceptable.  I have heard indirectly that Auralic has tried to address this recently such that Roon might sound better now on my gear. I no longer have interest in spending the $ to find out as LDS works well too. 

So, as in all things audio - YMMV. 

Sure glad I do not use streaming as a source for critical listening or use a server.

I stream for finding new music and artists. I want my stream to sound good but I am not going into the weeds looking to match the sources I have in analog and cd. 
 

Not interested in chasing that dragon. 

@jerryg123

I don’t quite understand your post? Not too long ago you started a thread asking, ‘Wondering what improvements I can made to my streaming end’

If you’re not interested in learning ways to improve streaming sound then why post here or even start a thread? I’m sorry to say but there no magic wand available that will transform your Node 2’s sound to analog or cd sound. 

sonic79
26 posts

Does this streamer maker have objective proof Roon degrades sound quality? Actual measurements that prove degredation of the signal?
 

Objective measurements are a tool to get better sound quality but they don’t constitute better sound quality. Measurements do not represent sound quality in its totality. In the end if it sounds better, it is better. Or if it sounds worse, it is worse.

Yours in music,

Ted Denney III

Lead Designer/CEO Synergistic Research Inc.