Current quality of Rune

@sns Yup, agreed. For sure if you focus enough on making Roon sound good it can achieve very high levels. The effort is worth it as the interface is so good.

It doesn’t take much to beat the design of the Stylus interface haha. But considerable effort to top the sound of an optimized Stylus, maybe beyond those getting started in streaming.

I too use Euphony OS (still) on my optimized Pink Faun 2.16x with 3 point-installed OCXO Ultra clocks playing an optimized Stylus to the Pink Faun Ultra USB bridge externally powered by an external Teflon Paul Hynes DR7t+. This single box combination along with QSA Landri wires gives me my best sound to date. Looking forward to besting this with the new PF OS with a Roon install which is my preferred interface.

@sls83

Congrats on walking away

Worst company ever

I have to throw my hat in the ring of Roon fans.  I think that it is excellent.  Great interface, works perfectly, randomly plays new music consistent with what I was listening to and have through that discovered new music and artists!  It is stellar. I also like the writeups about the albums and have actually learned things about music that I have listened to for years! I bought a lifetime plan when it first came out and that has been a great purchase.  However, as @phishhhhh4 pointed out, their tech support is below subpar.  if you have a problem, you must post it on their community forum.  To Roon’s credit, they do actually respond to those support posts, but it is cumbersome to post a problem, wait for a response, then respond to that, wait again, etc.  Luckily, I have been able to troubleshoot any issues myself.  The one thing about Roon that really is glitchy is their ARC app, which supposedly lets you stream to your iPhone when you are away from your network.  It is useless.  It works maybe 25% of the time, if that.  Most of the time it can’t connect.  it is perplexing that a free program like Plex, for example, has no problem connecting to the home server, but Roon can’t figure it out.  So I usually use Plex outside of the home.  But other than that, I can’t imagine another way to manage my music.

I run Roon on an old M1 MacMini to an Innuos Pulsar as a Roon endpoint. So much better than the MacMini straight into the DAC. I get all the Roon features and audio quality of a dedicated streamer.

@sls883 

As long as your streaming has sufficient speed and memory resources, Roon doesn't really have a "sound quality" per se unless you are using its dsp features which i don't.  More depends on whether you are using Tidal or Quobuz as they provide the sound quality.  Although its signal processing features have been added, Roon's original goal was to just pass that through without messing with the stream, and just organize Tidal and Quobuz into a great library interface--IMO it's the best interface i've used but as someone mentioned if you need support it's a PITA.  However, most support issues can be found on its support pages once you get the hang of searching.  Remember--you have to subscribe to either Tidal or Quobuz or both--that's where the music comes from--not Roon.