To ROON or not to ROON ?

I will say, excellent thread. Bringing out differences in values between the folks posting and different perspectives on external software or not. Minus the egos and hostility… outstanding. 

It would be great if all threads were like this. Everybody learns something. 
 

I am running a Roon core on my Synology NAS, playing my own library. In other words, my use-case is different than what you describe, since I am mainly interested in playing my library and not using the setup to discover new music. I do not subscribe to Qobuz and paid the one-time lifetime fee to Roon. With that said, I am very happy with Roon. The interface is not perfect, but once you get used to it, it is very easy and does a great job. I currently have 4,600 tracks in my library and am working on digitizing about 400 LPs and ripping about 300 CDs.

My basic use-case is sorting by artist, choosing an artist, choosing an album and playing from the start of the album. All of which is very easy to do. When an album is done, Roon keeps the music playing and does a really excellent job of selecting complementary tunes from my library. My wife and I are both really impressed with how good Roon is at doing this. To me, its the perfect radio station, playing all of my favorite artists and songs, and seems to sense my current "mood" well.

My setup is a Synology DS1821+ NAS Running DSM7 with 64TB HDD storage (Seagate EXOS drives), 2 SSD cache devices (Intel 670p series) and the Roon Core on a Samsung e-SATA SSD drive (850 EVO 250GB). I’ve aggregated the 4 1Gb ethernet ports to a Cisco SG200-26 switch and use a 1Gb fiber connection from the switch to a Lumin X1 DAC (in Roon only mode). The DAC outputs to a Pass Labs XP-22 preamp -> Pass Labs X150.8 Amp to YG Acoustics Hailey 2.2 speakers. In addition, I have Sonos throughout the house and will be upgrading my AVR to a NAD T778 in about two weeks which is Roon Ready. The Roon Remote controls all of this very nicely with the exception that I’ve discovered that the best way to group and ungroup Sonos devices is to pause play, group or ungroup, then resume play. If I group or ungroup while music is playing, the syncing takes a minute or two at best or the Core may get hung altogether. By pausing, grouping, playing, all seems to work OK.

Of course, Roon cannot group the Lumin and Sonos devices.

I may add a streaming service some day, but for now I’m enjoying ripping and rediscovering my library. I do have some recent adds like Snarky Puppy, Brandi Carlile and some other fill-ins that I’ve been downloading from HD-Tracks.

Your question can be answered in better knowing your streaming requirements. I can share some of the reasons Roon became a part of my streaming diet.

I used Qobuz by itself for 2.5 years before tying it into Roon. Now, I run Roon with Qobuz and Tidal libraries tied in, and I have separate subs to Spotify and YouTube as well. All these services have different use cases for me. I use YouTube for video, Spotify for remote listening, for lo-fi listening while working, and for sharing music, and I use Roon for hi-res listening.

I came to Roon when I upgraded streamers to the iFi Zen Stream. The Zen Stream didn’t have Chromecast built-in (still doesn’t), and I wanted an elegant way to get the music from my Android to the Zen Stream. Roon was the only elegant solution. When I started using Roon, I also found that I could fix the lack of library coverage Qobuz suffered from by also tying in Tidal. No system is perfect. Every streaming service will change how you listen and what you listen to. I do miss the new release curation from Qobuz being front and center. It’s possible for me to find that in Roon, but it’s more buried. Spotify’s content curation and playlists are my favorite out of any service, but Spotify doesn’t support quality source files. My workaround to getting Spotify content curation in high res is via Soundiiz, which is a service that syncs playlists across services. I sync the Spotify playlists to Tidal (which has more music coverage for the playlists that I generally like to listen to), and those synced playlists show up in the Playlists area in Roon. It’s more clunky than I’d like, but it gets the job done.

I’m also looking for ways to consolidate. If Spotify had a CD quality tier, I wouldn’t be using Roon. I didn’t find Amazon Music to be adequate, and I don’t want to use Qobuz or Tidal by themselves at this point. Apple Music may be one service that could replace Spotify and Roon for me, but iFi needs to update their streamer with Chromecast built-in.

One more element to Roon that I’m beginning to experiment with is Roon ARC. It just launched. It gives Roon remote listing abilities. It’s limited to phone apps for now. I hear that it has AirPlay support, but Chromecast and Android Auto support are missing. If Roon ARC becomes more robust, it could replace some of Spotify’s uses for me. I have attempted to share Roon with friends and family via Roon ARC, but it hasn’t taken for anyone yet. I imagine that it’s both not convenient enough, and the Amazon Music and Apple Music users are likely already satisfied with their services.

I do see benefits to hosting my own server. As long as I continue to use Roon, I’ll be playing with things that I couldn’t otherwise play with using the big streaming services. One area is upsampling at the server level (either in Roon or via HQPlayer). I will also experiment more with MQA and DSD formats (and DACs that support those formats). If I get the itch, I might also begin to build my own library of owned music, but that’s a long shot. Also, rooDial looks pretty neeto. So, Roon opens up ways to experiment or customize your music and your listening experience. If any of these things become a feature I have to have, then I’ll be married to Roon for a while longer.

Roon is wonderful, WHEN IT WORKS.  I am on my 6th year of using Roon and I've built my system around it so I am definitely a heavy user and a pretty big fan of the software.

However, while this happens with all software I'm sure, there is a pretty large group of Roon users that have a strong love/hate relationship with Roon.  That's because (1) it is not always stable/it doesn't run that well on lower end hardware even though it may fit within their system requirements; (2) the Roon team has their own strongly held design philosophy that excludes a number of use cases that will never be addressed (no folder access to a local collection); and  (3) Roon's update rollouts are often sh*t shows.  I've never had a serious issue with an update, but several have created havoc if you read their forums.

Roon also doesn't meet all of its promises - it's only a whole house audio solution if you live alone or can share a library with all inhabitants; their library management work is far from complete (try using a box set on Roon); and they seem to be focused on streamers more than local library folks these days (I know...dying breed).

I guess my point is that Roon is high reward but potentially high maintenance and possible high frustration at times.  Depends on how much control you want - i.e. J River and Foobar 2000 gave you lots of control but not a lot of sophistication.  Roon is sophisticated, but they're in the driver's seat and they always will be.

Definitely try it out. 

I use Roon with a $500 cheap DELL mini computer. I am a power user of Roon since I have 3 Zones for headphones and 2-channel, and sometimes Convolution filters (DSP) on the headphone Zone.

I helped a friend setup an audio booth at a show using Roon on a Apple laptop to 3 Zones. We created a network at the show just for the booth. This was without internet access since we did not want the participants to waste time browsing. So this was not a super powerful network. We also had some hi-res files, but no Convolution filters. The setup worked perfectly.

Roon is really solid and I love it. I was a user even before the product was released. About 7 years ago, I met the son of the PS Audio owner at a show and he was excited about a new product coming out called Roon. Based on that conversation I bought a Lifetime subscription to Roon for $450.