What do you mean by "bandwidth is flowing"?
Sound quality of Roon
I am considering trying Roon. I have been using my Bluesound Node but I am going to upgrade as I do enjoy streaming more and more using Tidal. It is quite an investment to get a NUC or Nucleus and then have a separate tablet to control it all.
But apart from the cost I have read some people say Roon does not sound good. Their streamer by blah blah sounds better. Is this true? For all that is required to use Roon, the hardware, the subscription and all, would Roon be popular if it made digital streaming sound bad?
I would love to hear people who have experience comment on this. There is info on the Roon Labs discussion site but as you can imagine it is saying this is BS Roon sounds great. I guess Roon as a software also has had updates, so maybe this is a thing that might have been true in the past?
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And @sonicfanatic what exactly do you need corroborated? That the quality of a streamer / server will advance the quality of the final sonic outcome? |
Network issues can be very complicated. I will admit, far more complicated than my networking smarts allow for. Issues with TCP, UPnP, router IP conflicts and on and on. As I was on the steep learning curve, I was having plenty of issues too. I even had the guys at SGC try to figure out why I couldn't run their software consistently in the opticalRendu and we eventually gave up and I returned everything. And they really know their stuff - far more than the average Joe, so that should tell you a lot. I've since rebuilt my LAN with fiber optic, added managed fiber switches, new fiber router, PSU's, etc, etc. And now Roon is ROCK solid (pun intended as I run ROCK via a NUC). It doesn't disconnect, doesn't cut off the ends of songs, doesn't skip a beat or anything else unpredictable. I *think* restarting Roon software/device temporarily refreshes the IP addresses and something (another device most likely) borks it down the road (it becomes conflicted). But it's too complicated to have any certainty.
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I definitely agree that trouble-shooting Roon is a highly complex process. But it’s just not fair to say that nearly all problems with Roon are the user’s fault and usually due to their crappy network. True: many users that complain of problems have crappy networks (many are powerline! Yuck!). False: Roon is stable if your network is. There are many ways in the way of ordinary use of Roon that cause it to tax itself to the point it piddles. Just do 15-20 searches in a row, adding tags to your search findings in between, then bring up a large tag and try to use focus on some of the tag results. It’s gonna choke. Someone mentioned that having many open remotes also seemed to tax Roon. I’ve had my eye on that as a potential cause as well and there does seem to be some correlation. I’m definitely not kicking Roon from a software design standpoint. I couldn’t do what I do with my music room without Roon. It’s brilliant in many respects. But that doesn’t make it stable. AND, if it were the case that a restart of the core software temporarily refreshes IPs and other data that were causing problems, why doesn’t Roon just do that every so often?
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In some cases Roon can be buggy if using many processes which taxes processors in many servers. For those using many Roon and/or HQPlayer dsp and other processes you're going to need a server with Intel I7 and above for seamless performance.
Again, Roon has no inherent reliability issues, seamless streaming requires some network and computer knowledge. The high likelihood of each of us having unique streaming setups makes troubleshooting difficult, diy fixes may entail steep learning curve.
I will offer the possibility Roon or any music player may not work seamlessly with every single possible streaming solution out there. These providers cannot possibly test for every single piece of streaming equipment and/or combination of this equipment. |
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