I have about a week left on the Roon trial. If I don't keep Roon, it'll be because I'm too set in my ways. It'll come up with lots of suggestions and its search function is great, but it is just not the same. The negatives are that for a long time I have primarily selected my music via folder browsing - I'd see an artist's name and say, "Yup, that's the person I want to hear right now." Roon doesn't show folders. It is also nice the way it shows you artist bios and info about other musicians and people on an album, sometimes along with an extra photo or two, but that's not worth a paid subscription to me. That's great when you want continuous background music, such as now when I'm working from home. The thing I like the most is the way, once you have specifically selected some music to play, it will continue to play other tracks in the same vein one your initial selections are finished. I have mixed emotions about Roon and still haven't decided if it is a keeper. To me, the choice between Roon and other music management programs is about the user interface and the ease of finding the music you want. I know that's not the correct "audiophile" answer, but I don't care. I'll start by saying that Roon sounds just fine, but I find it no different than what I heard via LMS. I previously used LMS (the Squeezebox management software) to manage my music - I'd used that for about 15 years. There’s no simple way to compare the sound of the two. Both have nice UIs, and both have quirks. Roon metadata seems better integrated with better connections between various elements. Audirvana has basic metadata, but it’s harder to access and harder to read. UPNP is more widely supported, but flaky. I know nothing about Audirvana, but am now three-fourths the way through a month-long trial of Roon. Audirvana uses UPNP for network streaming/playback. I play Jriver, Roon, VLC without the problems of Audirvana. I know and appreciate some of you will find Audirvana works fine, you're fortunate that it works, and it must be something wrong with my system. If Audirvana was as reliable as Roon, I would use it more often, but now I'm very tempted to remove Audirvana altogether. For only 2.50 a month more you can subscribe to Roon, which plays in a different league. For me, it’s a big letdown you can’t even focus on composer by name so that only favourites will show (streaming through Qobuz). Some operational 'features' with Roon are annoying, but not to the extent of how Audirvana can fall over. I am quite surprised how many positive reviews Audirvana Studio has received. I don't have SQ or transport issues with Roon, there's no upsampling, EQ, DSP, just playback as is. In this case, restart the Roon core and all good. If Roon falls over and this is very rare, the output is muted with file playback just stalling. I actually went to the trouble to compare them all before reaching this conclusion. Otherwise Audirvana would sound just like all the other (about half a dozen) bit-perfect players for OS X. Quit Audirvana, and played Roon without issue. As I mentioned, of course Audirvana is improving/sweetening the sound. It's not as if it was a hardship to play a redbook album. Imagine if the levels were straight to a power amp, blown tweeters to replace. Let the system stay idle for a few hours then played a redbook album, 5s of music then white noise from the speakers. Played a few albums while doing some chores, all looked good. used Jriver to find recently added and manually searched in Audirvana. The recently added titles are under playlists, but they're in alphabetical order, not from the filename date. Took about 15-20 minutes to sync the library adding some 50 albums or so, mainly redbook, nothing happens until the sync has stopped. But there seems to be a custom use of the application that Taiko has engineered for their device.I don't use Audirvana every day, yesterday fired up the latest version on a Win10 PC, UpNP to a Lumin U1. I know that a lot of Taiko Extreme users are happy with a Roon implementation using HQPlayer. But it has its own interface problems, specifically around remotely controlling the software from a laptop. But the interface can't compete with Roon. Sound quality is better than Roon on my system (even with HQPlayer as output, strangely). Tried Euphony Stylus about a year ago on a dedicated server. Have used it in a single server setup, dual servers and a few tweaks in between. I started using Roon a couple of years ago. But given the rapid pace of change in this domain I thought it would be useful to see what others are discovering. This is a common journey in our particular endeavor and not unvisited topic.
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