Roon sounded somewhat flat, lacking atmosphere and depth in comparison. A+ had better detail and body to the sound. On sound quality, I preferred A+ over Roon. I decided to audition Roon in early 2018 (not sure what version) with the free trial, mainly because of the multi-room, multi-device capabilities. On both counts, the move to A+ was clearly superior to iTunes. Most important to me is sound quality and reliability. I have been using Audirvana Plus for several years and Roon for almost a year. Late to the party, but I'll add my comments. Roon works this way but they don’t suggest it in there Knowledgebase. Anyhow, just wondering if some who are saying Roon is inferior may be deploying the core and player on one single device which is connected to the DAC. I believe this is to isolate the audio rig including DAC and player from noise generated by the hardware the core is running on, but I’m not totally sure on the reasoning behind this. The core is supposed to be connected via Ethernet for maximum SQ. Not sure this is proven to have an effect though.įinally, for those saying Roon doesn’t sound quite as good as Audirvana or others, Roon’s Knowledge base indicates that to maximize sound quality, the Roon “core” must be physically separated from the hardware running the player that is connected to the DAC.

On another note, my Mac storage is hybrid solid state and mechanical, which in theory is not supposed to be as good as pure solid state due to added noise on the USB line as well as emitted noise. I am using a Mac Mini, “headless” without a keyboard mouse or display and connected directly to my DAC via USB. Can I ask what you have Audirvana running on? Mahler123, you mentioned you don’t want to use a PC.

Roon vs audirvana