[reiserFS]

I kinda like the DSD upsampling introduced in the last version of Audirvana. A few crashes here and there, but otherwise quite stable for a experimental feature. 

 

[mikesale]

The Roon UX is amazing. You'd think it was a Steve Jobs inspired project from Apple... Except for Classical music, or music that is not well published by the music industry.
 
My head to head listening on *my* system and setup has very slight, but clearly noticeable sound differences with A+ coming out on top. 
 
Just to give you a look into the poor support of classical I took a snapshot of the genre categorization from Roon. If you know classical you'll recognize most if not all these images are all taken from very well tagged classical music and frankly not that obscure either. It was so funny I just had to share! 

 

[artur9]

  Just to give you a look into the poor support of classical I took a snapshot of the genre categorization from Roon. 
 

Yeah, I was floored when Roon couldn't identify one of the most famous classical pieces from a Spanish composer that was played by Miles Davis - repeatedly.
 
Then they stiffed me the hundred bucks.  Not going there.  Linn Kazoo gives me what I need for now.

 

[Krutsch]

  The Roon UX is amazing. You'd think it was a Steve Jobs inspired project from Apple... Except for Classical music, or music that is not well published by the music industry.
 
My head to head listening on *my* system and setup has very slight, but clearly noticeable sound differences with A+ coming out on top. 
 
Just to give you a look into the poor support of classical I took a snapshot of the genre categorization from Roon. If you know classical you'll recognize most if not all these images are all taken from very well tagged classical music and frankly not that obscure either. It was so funny I just had to share! 

 
Agreed on both points. I am not renewing my subscription. I am tired of "curating" my collection twice and I agree that A+ is a better sound experience.
 
The final straw for me was the whole "paw masher" UI for adding tracks to the queue. A common playback scenario for me goes like this:
 
1. Open an album
2. Play track 3, then 5 then 12 and then maybe 3 again, because I like that one.
 
Try doing that with Roon ... it's ridiculous how hard they made that simple, CD-player-like scenario.
 
Just my $0.02...

 

[AppleheadMay]

The Roon UX is amazing. You'd think it was a Steve Jobs inspired project from Apple... Except for Classical music, or music that is not well published by the music industry.

My head to head listening on *my* system and setup has very slight, but clearly noticeable sound differences with A+ coming out on top. 

Just to give you a look into the poor support of classical I took a snapshot of the genre categorization from Roon. If you know classical you'll recognize most if not all these images are all taken from very well tagged classical music and frankly not that obscure either. It was so funny I just had to share! 

Now we know where Rap started!

 

[Lohb]

2.5.1.4 and 10.11.5 working with DIRECT MODE here...Yes that was a fast hit by Damien in fixing the OSX update headache.

 

[Currawong]

I must have missed the problem, as I updated Audirvana a few days before I updated OSX. 
 
I'm trialling Roon at the moment. I have ZERO pretensions of trying to use it like I would iTunes or Audirvana Plus, but only for TIDAL or having it try and curate my library (ie: play random music I hadn't played before). I was using TIDAL the same way, with a "I'll take my chances on this playlist" method of listening based around genres. I find TIDAL is as hopeless at, say, selecting jazz as the Roon software is. Usefully for me at least, I can plug a bunch of DACs into various computers and have them play all at once for comparisons. 

 

[mikesale]

 
I'm trialling Roon at the moment. I have ZERO pretensions of trying to use it like I would iTunes or Audirvana Plus, but only for TIDAL or having it try and curate my library (ie: play random music I hadn't played before). I was using TIDAL the same way, with a "I'll take my chances on this playlist" method of listening based around genres. I find TIDAL is as hopeless at, say, selecting jazz as the Roon software is. Usefully for me at least, I can plug a bunch of DACs into various computers and have them play all at once for comparisons. 

I absolutely love how Roon allows you to explore popular (in terms of music industry, not "pop" per se) music in your collection and in Tidal's. I've had a great time reading the write ups on artists like Miles Davis and others. The UX experience of music related content integrated with the music is sensational. Something I would never want Audirvana to invest in though, this same content is easily available via google and I can pull up safari and I'm off to the races with Audirvana playing the music and being controlled by the IOS remote... just a different experience.
 
Audirvana is great at playing what you know you want from what you have access to. Roon good at exploring Rock, Pop, etc. to "remember" & "discover" music I want to engage & remember, but definitely *not* worth my money given my musical tastes. I also agree that the HTML-based UX isn't the best for constructing a play queue/playlists. For example the "right click to multi select" is just not intuitive. 

 

[Krutsch]

  I must have missed the problem, as I updated Audirvana a few days before I updated OSX. 
 
I'm trialling Roon at the moment. I have ZERO pretensions of trying to use it like I would iTunes or Audirvana Plus, but only for TIDAL or having it try and curate my library (ie: play random music I hadn't played before). I was using TIDAL the same way, with a "I'll take my chances on this playlist" method of listening based around genres. I find TIDAL is as hopeless at, say, selecting jazz as the Roon software is. Usefully for me at least, I can plug a bunch of DACs into various computers and have them play all at once for comparisons. 

 
The Direct Mode issue was very quickly fixed.
 
@Currawong After you have some time with Roon, I would be curious to read your impressions on sound quality. There are some very active threads on the Roon forum on this topic, with many writing that the sound is flat and lifeless. Speaking technically, it seems that Roon should sound like every other player, but maybe not.
 
An interesting read on the topic from Roon: https://kb.roonlabs.com/Sound_Quality

 

[reiserFS]

Did anyone else keep an eye on the memory usage for Audirvana Plus? It creeps up to 4GB while upsampling to DSD, which is just horrible. 

 

[Krutsch]

A quick FYI, if you are interested in exchanging your PC with something inexpensive for Roon playback (i.e. as an endpoint).
 
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/setting-up-a-raspberry-pi2-with-roonbridge-step-by-step-osx-version/9915
 
...someone created a nice FAQ for installing your own Roon Bridge software in a Rasp. Pi or Cubox-i.
 
I have the latter, for which I paid $139.00 from solid-run.com. Took me about 5 minutes to walk through the steps in FAQ and voila - a high quality Roon Ethernet-to-USB-to-DAC endpoint.
 
I may renew my subscription after all, when it expires...

 

[iamoneagain]

   
The Direct Mode issue was very quickly fixed.
 
@Currawong After you have some time with Roon, I would be curious to read your impressions on sound quality. There are some very active threads on the Roon forum on this topic, with many writing that the sound is flat and lifeless. Speaking technically, it seems that Roon should sound like every other player, but maybe not.
 
An interesting read on the topic from Roon: https://kb.roonlabs.com/Sound_Quality

If you really like Roon but not happy with the sound quality you can invest a little more and add HQPlayer to the mix.  It just runs in the background once setup and Roon is the front end.  It's a huge improvement with a DSD player (ifi micro dsd) but even with just PCM upsampling it's better.  I've compared the sound quality against the latest Audirvana + DSD beta and can't find any setting in Audivana that sound just as good.  Audivana sounds great but there's something just more natural and lifelike that I find with my current HQPlayer settings. 
 
As far as the Roon interface, I just listen to mostly 80's alternative and new indie music, so it does a great job with that.  My only issue is there is sometimes a few days lag before a new Tidal release shows up but that claim they are fixing that.  I also find the metadata sometimes takes a few weeks to show up new releases.  Always look forward to what new updates they'll release.  My wishlist would be remote internet access to my home library from work pc or iPhone. 

 

[Krutsch]

 
If you really like Roon but not happy with the sound quality you can invest a little more and add HQPlayer to the mix.  
 
...
 
As far as the Roon interface, I just listen to mostly 80's alternative and new indie music, so it does a great job with that.  My only issue is there is sometimes a few days lag before a new Tidal release shows up but that claim they are fixing that.  I also find the metadata sometimes takes a few weeks to show up new releases.  Always look forward to what new updates they'll release.  My wishlist would be remote internet access to my home library from work pc or iPhone. 

 
Yes. I've done the HQ Player thing. The SQ improvement depends on our DAC. I've used both a Cubox-i4Pro NAA implementation (too many drop-outs) and a MacBook Retina front-end with CUDA off-load (that works well). Fun to play around with, no doubt.
 
My biggest gripe with Roon is I am in the role of curating my library twice - once when I rip the CD or download the files (e.g. HDTracks) and again when something doesn't match up or isn't, yet, in the Roon database.
 
I buy a lot of new music and that's been hit-or-miss. Still, I think it's worth it for the discovery portion, all on its own. Today, I am listening to Mark Murphy, a Jazz singer who's newer release I bought a few years ago, but didn't listen to much. Roon surfaced his bio and I looked at the albums available in TIDAL and am now listening to his debut release from 1956.
 
I've had similar experiences from my much deeper classical collection. This is the magic of Roon.
 
My second biggest gripe is the queue / playback model, but I've ranted about that already

 

[Currawong]

  Did anyone else keep an eye on the memory usage for Audirvana Plus? It creeps up to 4GB while upsampling to DSD, which is just horrible. 

 
 

 

   
The Direct Mode issue was very quickly fixed.
 
@Currawong After you have some time with Roon, I would be curious to read your impressions on sound quality. There are some very active threads on the Roon forum on this topic, with many writing that the sound is flat and lifeless. Speaking technically, it seems that Roon should sound like every other player, but maybe not.
 
An interesting read on the topic from Roon: https://kb.roonlabs.com/Sound_Quality

If you really like Roon but not happy with the sound quality you can invest a little more and add HQPlayer to the mix.  It just runs in the background once setup and Roon is the front end.  It's a huge improvement with a DSD player (ifi micro dsd) but even with just PCM upsampling it's better.  I've compared the sound quality against the latest Audirvana + DSD beta and can't find any setting in Audivana that sound just as good.  Audivana sounds great but there's something just more natural and lifelike that I find with my current HQPlayer settings. 
 
As far as the Roon interface, I just listen to mostly 80's alternative and new indie music, so it does a great job with that.  My only issue is there is sometimes a few days lag before a new Tidal release shows up but that claim they are fixing that.  I also find the metadata sometimes takes a few weeks to show up new releases.  Always look forward to what new updates they'll release.  My wishlist would be remote internet access to my home library from work pc or iPhone. 

 
I'd like to give this a go, but the Signalyst site has no explanation about how to set anything up. I haven't even worked out how to remove items from the playlist in HQPlayer! That it started up with the volume at zero, leading me to a massive run-around trying to work out why I didn't have sound doesn't encourage me.

 

[iamoneagain]

   
 
 
I'd like to give this a go, but the Signalyst site has no explanation about how to set anything up. I haven't even worked out how to remove items from the playlist in HQPlayer! That it started up with the volume at zero, leading me to a massive run-around trying to work out why I didn't have sound doesn't encourage me.

With Roon, you don't have to worry about playlist or anything else on HQPlayer.  Anything you play thru Roon goes thru HQPlayer.  Roon is the front end and HQPlayer the back end.  What you need to do is setup the filter settings to your liking.
 
This should help you get setup.  Start with 2nd post by Miska. And then his 5th post for DSD setup.
 
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f8-general-forum/hqplayer-resampling-filter-setup-guide-ordinary-person-13298/
 
I personally like:
 
Poly-Sinc-short since it sounds the most analog to my ears.  My setting is:
 
poly-sinc-short
ASDM5
11.2896
 
I have an ifi micro dsd so I also use: 
 
SDM Pack: DoP  and on main screen, the 4th drop-down is SDM (DSD).  With these settings I get DSD256 upsampling. Also make sure volume is set to -3 for DSD.  He says to put -6 minimum number and 0 as max and set dial in-between. 
 
I'll admit HQPlayer is very confusing but once you set it up and find the filters you like, you don't have to touch it again using Roon.  
 
Forgot to add how to get Roon to work with HQPlayer.
 
Go to Settings on Roon, Audio, Add Network Device, HQPlayer, and leave default localhost if installed on same machine.  If on different machine, you'd need to get the local IP address and enter in there and then on HQPlayer make sure the globe icon is selected.  Then choose HQPlayer as your output for Roon.  Depending on your settings it make take a few moments to first load up.