My Brief Roon Trial

It's a terrific piece of software. You get 14 days free trial and then they zap you for the full $119.88 (if I read right).

I tested it with an MP3 file of Annabel Lamb's Backwards Through The Looking Glass, which is unjustly not available on CD. Even Spotify knows not of her. You Tube does, and the track you need to hear is lined up for you



Notice the fierce attack of the piano, the echo around the drums. Every note and drum stroke is clear, isolated, percussive. And that echo makes the whole thing sound slightly spooky. And that's over my Mac Air speakers via You Tube. You can only imagine what the original vinyl sounded like. Or what the rips I found on the internet sound like.

So with huge anticipation, I played it through Roon onto my Sonos Connect and out through the amp.

It was like a veil had been put over the whole thing. The attack wasn't there. The echo was not as clear. Roon told me it had chopped off the last 8 bits to get a 16-bit signal to send to the Sonos Connect.

So I played it through File Explorer on my iPod Touch and out through a Jitterbug and black Dragonfly into the amp.

Oh yes. That's it. That's how I remember it.

It is tempting to conclude this only proves that the Sonos DAC is not as good as the black Dragonfly, and perhaps that the Mac Air isn't as good a source as a more recent Pod Touch(?!). Those things may or may not be true. It doesn't matter. Because it shows that with my current set-up Roon doesn't play as nice as my current file-streaming method.

And Roon had to fit in to my current set-up. Not start me off buying new DACs and other gear.

Everything else about Roon is as advertised. It wailed through my 1,000 directory collection in less than ten minutes. It found album art all over the place. It had some interesting things to say about some of the discs and artists. It found every device in my house in the blink of an eye. (But then so does Windows Explorer on my Windows Machine, and my Air finds all my Sonos speakers and presents them in the menu of the loudspeaker). It found Air Play and Sonos, though it didn't find my iDevices.

If I want to know about the artist and album, there's a little thing called... oh, what is it?.... Wikipedia. If I want lyrics, those are available on a dozen sites. If I want my AAC rips cataloged I use Apple Music. Because I've downloaded a lot of commuter music my AACs are a superset of my CDs, so that Music "Library" is the entire collection.

I prefer to listen to CDs when I can. Streaming services are useful for background music, or checking out an artist or composer. At those prices Roon needs to be a daily driver, and it won't be for me.

Finally, Roon is a resource hog. I watched it ease its way up to 1GB of RAM, and it prefers to be the exclusive user of whatever machine it is running on.