To Roon or not to Roon?

I wanted to share MY thoughts on Roon, since I got to try it for more than a month now. Thanks to @mofimadness for posting on the Thanks Giving Friday Roon deal.

I will straightaway jump to MY conclusion:

Roon is the best thing for digital audio if you have all the time in the world. It provides so much more information and can upscale not only your FLACs, but also Tidal (and most likely Qobuz) to DSD. If I were to subscribe to Roon, I would straightaway choose the lifetime subscription and not the month-to-month. No two thoughts on that.

But Roon is not for me. At least not till I have retired OR have enough free time at hand to look up new music/artists/etc. My daily struggle is to find an hour to 1 1/2 hours to listen to music. So when using Roon I found that I am constantly distracted by the amazing meta data/information it provides. It tells you about the many versions of a song, biographies of artists, credits, links to other artists, and tons of information you might not even have thought of. I am no being sarcastic here - it really is a lot of useful information as an audiophile/music enthusiast. But I already am building a library in Spotify and Tidal (simultaneously) about new artists/music I come across when I read a review in a magazine or log into forums. So I want to focus on listening to the album/music. Whatever said and done, with that Roon interface on the pad, I simply cannot stop myself from not looking at it. My problem is I cannot do music as background. While most people at work put their headphones and "zone out" while doing their work, I simply cannot do that. If I do that then I would simply focus on music and not do my work. So, that reasoning for owning Roon is also ruled out. In the past few days, I figured out how I can play radio stations as "Playlists" in Foobar and control it through the MonkeyMote iPad app. So my favorite radio stations like Radio Paradise and Folk Alley are all accessible to me via the app and I don’t have to go to the desktop on the audio stand anymore. Of course, Roon makes internet radio much more accessible and presentable and gives you access to hundreds of radio stations without doing any manual configurations.

But, "time" being the constraint for me, I will not be renewing my subscription to Roon for now. But to the folks who can manage to spend a few hours a day on music, Roon is one of the BEST option there is. I say "one of the best" because, I have not compared it to Audirvana or others that have similar capabilities as Roon. But I am glad that I gave Roon a shot and find it outstanding, if I had enough time at hand for listening to music OR if background music was my thing.

I'm using an Auralic Vega G2 as a Roon endpoint in one of my systems and have had no problems with it. But I only use the lightning app for simple setup functions, not for managing or playing music. 

My trial ended today. The experience to control Tidal was neat. But I am glad the non-Roon music session has much less distraction. Tidal daily discovery is super helpful for discovering new music. Honestly, playing Tidal through mConnect HD app sounds even better. The only difference being this connection is using UPnP and not the laptop USB. 

I use Linn Akurate level kit as my streamer/DAC. I tried Roon, running the Core on a MacBook Pro. The Roon app is fun with a cool magazine like browser. The radio function where you get an auto feed of songs similar to the last album played is nice.

But for me Roon never really added anything I needed. I also have two homes and always having to set up the MacBook was annoying. I also found the sound quality I got from my native Linn app was better so I cancelled Roon and have not missed it.