I’ve been using Roon since pretty close to its launch in a number of configurations (whole home and single station at office), for the past two years it’s been exclusively whole home and Audirvana at my office. I’m now building a Rock NUC to run Roon at my office for a few users.
I have to say I was surprised to read some of the early comments in this thread that AV sounded better to folks than Roon. That has never been my experience between the two, but I did take the time to read and understand Roon and all of its settings/requirements early on which are crucial to best performance.
AV has always had a bit of a crackle or static out of both Mac Mini i7 w/64gb of Ram and even a new M1 with 16gb of Ram playing into a myriad of $1K dacs. I went through troubleshooting like an IBM IT Support Tech telling someone to plug in the damn computer to no avail if you know the joke. I went to try the new AV Studio last week but it will not open on my M1 Mac Mini, regular AV does fine just not the Studio version hence I’m building a Roon Rock NUC.
My home setup is an i8 Rock Nuc in an Akasa Turing Case. No issues, not even with Roon 1.8 that got some hate on the interwebz.
I’ve run Roon headless on a few different Mac mini’s over the last 5 or 6 years too so I’ve got a multitude of experience with it.
Anyway this has been my experience between the two.
I’ve installed the trial of Audirvana Studio. Total bs. It does not even read my library and the whole interface is messy. At least Audirvana 3.5 worked.
Anyone else try Studio yet?
Update: I looked in the wrong place. Of course it’s not in “My Music” but in the “Local” category.
So whats supposed to be in “My Music” then???
I have a 2011 2.5GHz i5 (8gb) running High Sierra (10.13.6).
I have never noticed this system to be slow at all. However, I initially struggled with a newer Mac Mini running Catalina. It gave me fits and was about to give up when an individual on the Roon boards surmised my problem might be the OS.
It was hard to downgrade Catalina, so I took a chance on an older MM with and older OS. I have had it up and running for over a year now 24/7 hooked up via ethernet. It runs Roon server (that’s it). It is USB to Gungnir MB and stream to 3 Bluesound Nodes around the house.
I’ve been a Jriver user for eons but decided to try Audirvana and Roon and… HQPlayer. It is astounding to me that there are differences between all of the players with Roon and HQPlayer being the outliers.
So that I can elaborate a little I have been a headphone listener for decades from electrostatics to planar but it’s not the headphones that matter but rather being able to distinguish differences or nuances.
JRiver and Audirvana are for sure kissing cousins. There is very little if anything to distinguish audibly between the two when a Dac is setup identically with both. But when Roon is brought into play there is a distinctive sound difference. Mostly with spacial characteristics and with some recordings a difference with mid bass that is very distinctive. To a trained listener it would be impossible not to notice. HQplayer does the opposite. HQplayer audio, to me, becomes more restrictive and slightly muted compared to JRiver or Audirvana. Compared to Roon it is very distingtive. I realize that HQplayer has various filters and all have some impact but I could never get back to JRiver with any setting I used. Does that mean it’s better or just different… Audible preference should be the prevailing factor.
So to me a lot is going on under the table that nobody talks about. It certainly isn’t bits are bits and they all sound the same BS.
I’m just in the beginning of this audible puzzle but will post again when I have more listening time.
I played around with HQ player for a bit. Does some interesting things with the spatial qualities of digital reproduction when upscaling. However, when comparing it to simple red book via a CD transport HQ player upscaling has blunted dynamics and sounds veiled, similar to what it sounds like you experienced. I was underwhelmed especially given the hype HQ player gets. I experimented with some filters but it was starting to become more about the HQ player than the music.
The spatial “tricks” HQ pulled off weren’t enough to make me choose a mild lateral increase in separation over a global loss of dynamics and clarity.
Continuing on from a conversation on the Chord thread with @Doc and @ProfFalkin , the easiest thing to do if you’re curious about which player to get is to try a free trial for each of them. Audirvana, Jriver and Roon all offer free trials. Honestly, I could tell differences between them but it all came down to preferences for me. I liked Roon the best but didn’t want to spend that kind of money so I kept Foobar, which didn’t sound worse than Jriver or Audirvana for my preferences and setup.
I realized later that if I treated Roon as an audio component, then that took away some of the psychological stigma of spending so much on a lifetime license, so I bought a NUC, a PI2AES and am very happy with that.
Sounds like that’s what I need to do (no pun intended!). I have a lot to learn about the PI2AES approach, especially since the USB ground is isolated on the Qutest and does a lot to avoid taking in the digital trash.
The Yggy’s Unison interface does the same thing with USB trash, and if that’s all I had, I’d be very happy with it, but I do find that Roon → PI2AES → Yggy’s AES input is just a little better.
Building both the NUC and PI2AES was a lot of fun. I was originally going to buy something pre-made, but some very helpful forum members persuaded me to go the DIY route, which saved a lot of money. Neither of them are hard to build - you just follow the instructions and click components into the right place.
Just replying to my own post to try to get @andris’ attention so we can talk about NUCs with @doc outside of the Chord thread.
@andris it’s interesting that you used a fanless case. I thought about that but decided to use the regular case for my first attempt, to see how that went, since I could always move it to a fanless case later, if there was a problem. It’s actually very quiet, with the fan almost never coming on. I also use the stock power supply. I’ve read conflicting reports about whether a linear power supply helps a NUC, so I’m not sure if I want to spend that kind of money yet. This low noise NUC power supply from Teddy Pardo is intriguing, although I don’t think it’s linear.
Also, to your point about Raspberry Pi solutions not always being great, I think that the PI2AES is a very well engineered solution. The owner of the company clearly put a lot of thought into it and worked with SBAF members to prototype. Not trying to come across as defensive, just mentioning that I shared your concerns when I was looking for streaming solutions, and this one is superb IMO.
Yeah, that sounds like a setup where you’d notice the difference. I got it when I had a Hugo 2, so same as your Qutest. What are you using as a source?
Foobar is great. I tested it against some premium players last year (Audirvana and JRiver) and although I could detect some differences between them, I couldn’t determine which was best, so I decided to keep using using Foobar as my main player, since it was free.
I did buy a lifetime license to Roon a few months ago, and that gave me an incremental increase in SQ over Foobar, but that could just as easily been because I was feeding my Yggy with an AES cable instead of USB. But I still use Foobar for things that are not yet in my Roon library and it’s fine.
I second what @andris said about the Power Plant and power cables. I use power cables from Cullen. I bought them because they’re reasonably priced and… well if I’m going to have nice gear, why not have nice cables? I’ve always used them in my current system and didn’t really care if they were better than stock or not. But after several months, I did recently plug in another cable into my Nautilus out of curiosity and the soundstage was smaller and the sound was a little congested, relative to what I was used to. I reconnected my Cullen cable and the sound was back to what I was used to. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting that.
BTW, the Power Plant is expensive but PS Audio has a really good trade in policy, so if you have any old electronics lying around in the basement, you can trade it in, valued at the original purchase price, up to $750.
Thanks for the replies. As far as the PC goes, yes it is my main home PC. The files are FLAC. I have an laptop that I only use for audio, but it does have other applications on it. I take it that you think a dedicated source is a better option. I could make the laptop my dedicated music machine. I have heard a lot of guys on the forum use Roon; I am going to check it out.
