The Roon Dilemma

Understood. Yet, there is that old saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Unneeded changes are the route to new bugs and wasted user energy.

I agree that Roon support is outstanding. I've even asked in their forum about JRiver issues tangentially related to Roon and got far better answers from Roon than I did from JRiver.

I didn't hear any difference in fidelity, and I think that such differences are difficult to pin down (i.e., user-dependent). What people like are the automatic metadata, the available information on most releases, the linking among releases and artists, and the virtually seamless integration of Tidal or Qobuz with one's own library.

 

This is pretty much what Roon is about. Roon Radio is the other big feature I like. Although it has other features, I use my network streamer only as a Roon endpoint.

 

Can you tell me how its better than DLNA? Trying to understand why Roon is being recommended and people are buying lifetime subscriptions when DLNA seems to work well at least for me.

Am I missing something that Roon does and is worth paying for?

 

It's all about what you want and need. If you've been using DLNA for years and have no issues with it, you probably don't need or care about what Roon offers. Like I said, the biggest difference to me seemed to be the simplicity of the setup and the user interface. I've never really loved the user interface of any DLNA based apps. I won't argue for either one because I don't claim to know enough about the technical differences but here are some good resources I think.

What's the point RAAT vs DLNA?
Roon Knowledge Base - RAAT
What's wrong with UPnP?

 

I've been wondering what's so great about UPnP/DNLA? I've never had good experiences with it. I tried JRiver, Twonky, some others I can no longer remember, and finally just settled on LMS, which worked fine to expose the directory structure of my file library on a QNAP NAS. But I ended up not using it much, except to stream to a SBT in my office. Good riddance to it all. Now I use that SBT as a Roon Bridge for my office system.

FWIW: I play classical and jazz, and little (but some) of anything else.

 

Great reference links with lots of good information. Thanks for posting!

 

Thanks, after reading some of these I have no idea what some of the issues people have with DLNA are? They are doing something really wrong.

For the Asset UPNP program I install it on a pc, edit one setting to tell it to point to the external drive my music is on, edit another setting to say transcode every thing to .wav and I'm done. Because it is transcoded to .wav it maintains the quality of my lossless files and also has compatibility to be played on pretty much any possible device

My music is correctly tagged and in the correct folder structure and I never have any issues. I'm getting album art correctly served to any device, the lossless quality of the audio is preserved and the meta data is preserved.

The ONLY thing I want to do with DLNA that I can't is serve up my audio outside my internal network.

So After reading some of these articles I think most people just do it wrong or have no idea what they are doing.

 

My experiences with Roon are limited to the “lite” version (Roon Essentials) that came bundled with my Elac Discovery music server. All I can say is that should I upgrade down the road to a server/streamer that can do DSD, I wouldn’t hesitate to pony up for the full license. My disc spinning days are largely over.

 

In my case I did it the setup right. The UPnP server found all my stuff and transcoded my files the way I wanted it too. It's just that I thought the user experience sucked. On top of that it didn't work very well at all for classical, without significant effort editing tags/metadata. Roon isn't perfect for classical either, but it's better. I don't need to transcode anything, although with Roon I can if I want to.

1. How does a DNLA/UPnP solution integrate my Qobuz account?
2. How does a DNLA/UPnP solution suggest other music that I don't have in my library, based on what I listen to in my current file/Qobuz library.
3. What's the DNLA/UPnP counterpart to Roon Radio; that is, when my selection (e.g. album, playlist, tag) finishes playing, continue playing random selections from my library based on my musical tastes (i.e. play history).

These are important and what makes Roon great for me, because that's how I discover a lot of new things that match my tastes. The more I use Roon the better it gets, and I can also use Thumb Up/Thumb Down on things to help it improve suggestions.

 

Actually meant to say playing random selections that may – or may not (e.g. content discovered on Qobuz) – be from my library.

 

Roon is a great product at a fair price.

I'm a bit schizophrenic -- I buy annual licenses but I purchased a Roon Nucleus to run Roon Core (Rock). I do a lot of streaming, so Roon's continued ability to integrate with the hi rez streaming services (Tidal and Qobuz, so far) is very important to me. If and when Amazon offers its hi rez streaming service, things may get interesting....

 

I'm on my first year of Roon, but have fully embraced it. I think when I renew I'll spring for the lifetime subscription. As a hard core vinylphile a lot of money into records and an analog rig it has been the game changer to get me more into digital playback.

I'm curious. What made you decide to get a Nucleus, rather than going the NUC route (which I have done)? Did you add internal storage to the Nucleus for a library, or are you using something external (NAS, USB drive, etc)? The Nucleus looks really cool, but I felt like the premium of it could be used better elsewhere.

 

Mconnect HD is an iPad app that does a nice job of integrating both Qobuz and Tidal into a UPNP environment. I use it with a Cambridge CXN with excellent results. I especially like the fact that I can build a queue pulling tracks from Tidal, Qobuz as well as local files.

$5.99 well spent

 

It seems absolutely bonkers to me to charge $500 without this feature. Like, this should've been part of the package from version 1.0.

 

I got the Nucleus (not a Nucleus+) because I was willing to pay a premium to avoid the hassle of getting a NUC to work. I'm not a luddite, but I was also not confident that I could go down the NUC path without some aggravation. The Nucleus is truly plug and play, so I got what I paid for and I'm happy. I have a BIG USB thumbdrive stuck in the back of the Nucleus. I generally don't rip music from discs because I have a terrific dSC Vivaldi disc transport, and I've largely stopped buying hi rez downloads because I can stream hi rez with equivalent SQ, so I don't have huge storage demands. At some point, I may stick an SSD in the Nucleus if my storage requirements increase.

 

Got it. Sometime I prefer the expense of convenience too.

In this case, though, I read through the Roon documentation on setting of a NUC, before I decided to spring for it. It seemed pretty straightforward. Once I had the NUC with SSD(s) and RAM installed, the Roon Knowledge Base docs had me up and running within an hour, although it took overnight in addition to get all my files (~400 GB) copied over to the internal storage. I like how the Nucleus looks but I'm glad I saved the expense. The NUC running ROCK is just an appliance now, and it has the performance of the Nucleus+.

 

Yup. The Roon documentation made it appear that the NUC setup was idiot-proof. I decided not to prove them wrong.

 

Is this just for listening on your Ipad, or does this act as a remote control for something like JRiver on your media PC?

 

Yeah, it was easy peasy. Even restoring a Roon database backup from my Mac Mini setup couldn't have been easier. The Nucleus should serve you well. If you decide to add a SSD for storage they aren't even that expensive anymore. I got a 1 TB Samsung EVO for less than $150, and the slightly lesser performing QVO version (which is really good enough) is only about $110.

I really like the idea of running Roon on ROCK. It just eliminates any question of other software trying to compete for CPU/memory, like there might be running on Windows or macOS. I previously had one issue where I started getting 2-3 sec dropouts. I guess some errant process on my Mac was causing an issue. A reboot resolved it thereafter, but that got me thinking about running a ROCK appliance. I'm glad I made the change.

 

It acts as a remote control for pulling my local files off of my seagate personal cloud NAS (running Twonky) and pushing them to the Cambridge CXN. It also pulls the files from either Qobuz or Tidal and pushes them to the CXN. No data goes through the iPad - Mconnect is just acting as a DLNA control point

 

Does this only work with Cambridge players, or does it work with Oppos too?

 

I will take time to say thanks to everyone who has contributed to the conversation so far. It's refreshing to see a forum discussion go this long without it descending into insults and name-calling. Consequently, I have learned a lot about how others listen and the pros and cons of Roon and DNLA/UPnP.

 

It will work with any UPNP/ DLNA compliant device that can act as a media renderer. I am not familiar with Oppo equipment but you can check the specs on your unit to see.

 

Thanks. I looked into it, and it appears that it will remote-control chromecast-compliant devices only. So no Oppos.

 

Darko posted some thoughts on this just a few days ago. Still very much a fan of LMS/iPeng. Glad I have a spare Touch...

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