Made the Move and Not looking back!

My perspective is that Roon's strong point is information about the music you are listening to -- who was the drummer on that album, and where can I hear more of him or her? Roon also claims the ability to introduce you to other artists similar to the ones you already like. If you like these features, you're probably a Roon fan.

I tried Roon and found I don't really explore music in the way it offers. I haven't found myself particularly entranced by the musicians themselves, and often found the "similar artists" Roon recommended just didn't do much for me. Yeah, the styles may have been similar, but the new-to-me artist frequently just didn't grab me.  I have a Qobuz subscription and have a lot more fun exploring their new releases every Friday -- I've found more new-to-me interesting artists that way than Roon ever did, often in styles and genres that have zero relation to anything I've been currently listening to.

As is common in the audio hobby, YMMV. Use what works for you.

@carlsbad2 Is there a reason to wait till your Roon subscription expires? Go ahead and start using the free Innuos Sense app now. I had a one-year with Roon and downloaded Sense the minute it came out in summer of 2021. I never used Roon again despite being paid up thru Feb. 2022.

@mlsstl +1, you covered a lot of ground there. Totally agree Roon is information-centric. That’s how it was pitched to me. Some love that which is awesome. No sour grapes here. Not saying one is better that the other for everyone. I love IPA’s but couldn’t care less that so many don’t.

@boostedis. I never even tried the dsp feature during the 6 months I used Roon prior to the release of Innuos’s Sense app. Reminder: my SQ comments are limited to my experience on one player brand only: Innuos.  But to reiterate, there are quite a few Innuos users who’ve also observed that Sense sounds better than Roon.
 

Roon support is easily the worst support for a good product that has ever existed in the planet earth....days go by...you finally get a response and it’s"have you tried rebooting your core".

It’s really terrible. It took them 3 years to finally tell me my music database was beyond the capability of my Nucleus+ to handle. True story. Then they refused to refund the price of the Nucleus blaming my library while saying the Nucleus was working fine.

All this Inspired me to purchase an Innuos Pulsar which will arrive in a day or 2. I’m heartened by all the positive reviews of the Sense app and really hope I can dump Roon. It will be a glorious day when that happens

The thing with Roon is you can run it on anything. The documentation does list minimum spec requirements for various platforms but it’s up to the user to integrate the hardware and software in many cases. Results can easily vary.

The nice thing about products like Innuos and others is they do the integration for you. That’s a good option for some but you probably will pay a premium for it. Applies to Roon as well if one elects to go with the hardware they sell that already has Roon integrated for you.

I do systems integration for a living. Roon core is running great for me on a $300 desktop mini PC, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. I also run Plex and work remotely on it all at the same time. No problems. I use Cambridge Audio streamers, Mac, iPhone, and tablets all as Endpoints or controllers. It’ can get a little complicated sometimes mainly because Roon is so versatile in how it streams, does displays, etc. But it sounds top notch streaming on my main hifi setup or elsewhere. It’s cool to have music playing throughout the house and even outside from time to time.

I’ve been streaming now for about 15 years. Started with Roon earlier this year . Used Squeezebox and Plex mostly for streaming prior.  My library is ~1Tb of mostly CD res FLAC files  

Different strokes for different folks. Master it somehow though and Roon is music heaven!

@boostedis 

You make a great point. However, as I stated in my previous post, I wasn’t using any DSP through Roon. The comparison I did was Auralic’s LDS playing a specific file and then Roon on my Auralic unit playing the exact same file. I tried multiple files. BTW-  I was running Roon Core on a souped up Mac Mini w/ a solid state hard drive, 16GB of ram exclusively dedicated to roon. Everything else was turned off.  It was the purest test I could do.  Auralic’s Lightning DS sounded significantly better than Roon and it was easily discernible. 

I get that many people love Roon. i, too, loved the interface and meta data. Those who claim their system sounds great using Roon - I’m sure they’re right. But the question they may not be answering is: does it sound as good as it could?  

If they’re satisfied, great. But, if they’re curious to wonder “what if?”, the only way to know is to compare both. 

Best,