To Roon or not to Roon.....?

Not offended at all - bemused is what I experienced which is a nice feeling.:slightly_smiling_face:

I understand where you are coming from - I accept you may be correct and I may have a better opinion of it all at a later date.

A discussion of it all was the point of this thread so Iā€™ve added my take so far.

DB.

I suppose what we are seeing here is that while we all accept one of us might prefer, say, Linn over Naim, that some of our experience shows us that there is no difference in the UPnP protocol and RAAT from a SQ perspective, although if things are not optimal it may appear that there is a difference.

However it may end up just as some people hear a difference between Ethernet cables and some others do not, it may all be a case of personal preference.
I believe the bigger differences here are ears rather than systems and think the ā€œmore revealing systemā€ is an unintentional red herring and the perceived (or otherwise) differences are more down to ears (brain) than system.

But variety is the very spice of life and letā€™s celebrate rather than denigrate this aspect.

.sjb

I think that says a lot. No point auditioning and listening. If you have a different opinion from what you are supposed to have then you are crazy.

Iā€™m out of this - enjoy!

VThis is not what I meant, my articulation does not do my thoughts justice. What Iā€™m trying to say is that our hearing - and I have hearing loss so am acutely aware of this, has a greater impact than the system.

Apologies if you thought I was trying to be negative or antagonistic, but I have learned that we all do hear differently, and I am aware my hearing is suboptimal (I have audiologists to confirm this) so I appreciate others hear may be super-optimal. I just donā€™t think its primarily system dependent rather hearing dependent. And then again I may be totally wrong.

No need to be ā€œout of hereā€ though, there is nothing personal in my post and Iā€™m only trying to explain as best I can from my own experience which I believe @Darkebear is also doing.

.sjb

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Sloop, I think DB is being uncharacteristically closed to dialogue here despite writing:

I donā€™t think anyone is doubting that he heard what he heard, just that his conclusion might have been premature, since several of us who have experimented with Roon setup have found that SQ can be significantly affected by a range of factors to which DB is usual highly and very helpfully attentive, although in this case he seems to have been unsure of what gear was being used never mind how it had been installed/set up.

You add a further perspective on hearing which is something that we all have to bear in mind as we age. I remember my first hi-fi ā€œguruā€, Mike Stewart at Studio 99, explaining how he had moved from what he found the most accurate phono cartridge of the time to a product he acknowledged tilted up in the treble, but which sounded more like what he would have heard from the more balanced cartridge when he was younger and his high-frequency hearing hadnā€™t deteriorated. He was younger then than I am today - and didnā€™t ride a motorbike or go to loud rock concerts, though he did race carsā€¦

So, I agree. Set-up can mean that what we hear is not necessarily the best equipment can deliver - and that streaming can be every bit as daft as LPs and turntables with which way up the drive belt is etc - while equally what we hear may not be what others hear and thatā€™s before preference comes into it.

These are all interesting perspectives and good to share.

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OK - accepted, but I think Iā€™m upsetting people here and there is a lot more to life that adding more of that is my view. I like discussions - open discussions with a degree of respect and no agreement demanded or sought personally.
I personally like to speak to the issue rather than at the person - but it can happen in the moment and we all make mistakes and I claim no perfection in that area, but I am willing to learn and make adjustments as I go.

It is when it seems to go into personal attacks along the line of not having the ā€˜rightā€™ view that someone else or some group have formed and hence needing ā€˜helpā€™ to conform ā€¦I avoid politics and religious discussions because of this sort of predilection toward dogmatic conforming to predetermined consensus as it does not suit me - I accept it is the way of many so I remove myself when that begins to appear in discussion.

It looked like it was happening in this discussion - if so Iā€™m happy to let it be and do something else - if not then Iā€™ll contribute more. Either way Iā€™m not too bothered, but generally like to be positive about life and people until disappointed beyond a certain threshold - I know it when it happens and I though it did last night.

Lets move on then.

DB.

Great!

If you do go for another demo, please allow us to chime in with our own set-up experiences so you can see whether they make a difference.

Cheers

Mike

Iā€™ve never prevented that or wanted to in the past and is a lot of the reason I read and post on this forum. :slightly_smiling_face:

I generally avoid other forums as they tend to degenerate, but the Naim one seems to survive in the main.

DB.

Looking forward to your next Roon demo DB.

Hi everyone. Today I listened to the Roon software from my friend Naim dealer. He installed it as a probationary period in his nas qnap. I must say that it sounds good and I saw that the stage is more open and broad. Now I ask you if I wanted to give it a try I can insert roon in the Western Digital my cloud 3 tb that at home? For now I have this in addition to Unitiserve 2tb. Iā€™m already thinking about selling my Nait5si to make room for the Nait xs2 as an up grade ā€¦ in order to improve the streamer

You need a fairly powerful NAS to run Roon, or a laptop or desktop computer. If you already have any of those, you can use it. Then, if you like it, you may decide you want to buy a separate device to run Roon, such as a Mac Mini or Intel NUC.

I have a Mac 21" but I would like to take a new nas synology or qnap

You mean an iMac? That should be OK. If you buy a NAS, it needs to be a powerful one to run Roon, unlike a UPnP server which is much less demanding.

Roon is not at all demanding if you donā€™t do any digital filtering, and you donā€™t need metadata processing updates done speedilyā€¦ in fact you could use a Piā€¦ however I do use an iMac with it running in the background. Never notice itā€™s there, and there is still a huge amount of processing headroom even with running DSP on DSD (Roon can indicate this)

I liked the DS218 + or the qnap ds251 + 2g

You run it at the risk of poor performance on anything lower than an i3. Yes it can run on lesser.processors but you will loose a lot of its.functionality. Also processing your library for the first time cripples the low end systems as it.processes each file to find itā€™s dynamic range so it can display it. A lot of users have had suboptimal performance and experience. Not to mention multiroom will not do well either. One endpoint you may well do ok. But if your looking to scale up your Roon eco system then I would look elsewhere than a Nas. Like anything donā€™t skimp on what the Roon core runs on. You wouldnā€™t feed your Naim kit with suboptimal source so why run Roon on one. Defeats the whole point of paying for a high end system if you ask me.

Yes, but the Ethernet TCP based connectivity decouples the media server performance from SQ. but your point about crippled functionality is a fair one.

I have Roon core running on a Synology 918+ (on a WD Red, not an SSD) and itā€™s fine here (although I do no DSP or other compute intensive stuff). There is a nice installation from Crieke that you can find in their forum. Best wishes.

Regards alan

ps - Apropos the main thread topic, I just bounced back and forth between Naim app and Roon on Tidal version of David Sylvian ā€œRed Guitarā€ and on Nova hear no noticeable difference. Same thing with locally stored Steely Dan (three tracks: Babylon Sisters, Kid Charlemagne, and Reelinā€™ in the Years) via UPnP (MinimServer, no transcode just FLAC 44.1 kHz 16bit) and Roon: no noticeable difference. Both servers (Roon and Minim) are on the same Synology NAS, which is also where the media is stored. Normal wired Ethernet, two switches between Nova and NAS, three and fibre modem to get to Tidal out on the Internetā€¦

We have managed to get Roon working this morning for the first time.
DSP Engine is disabled in the interests of sound quality.

All music, whether from the new server, the Synology NAS drive or Tidal is seamlessly integrated.

We are in the honeymoon period with Roon. Absolutely love it!

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Good stuffā€¦is the cabling from the Roon Core no longer passing through the Melco?