What am I missing? Does Roon somehow offer better sound quality for example?
The main thing that got me into Roon was the ability to support Meridian endpoints without having to invest in Sooloos. At the time that Roon launched, I could buy a MS200 + Roon subscription to get Meridian streaming into my DSPs or I could have purchased MS200 + Sooloos server for at least £1300 more.
Is there anything other than Sooloos and Roon that provide direct support to Meridian Endpoints (excluding the 210)?
Other advantages:
You can use non-Meridian endpoints, so not propriety.
Not if Roon for some reason was to bite the dust tomorrow.
Roon Labs, have stated that if the company were to fold, it would issue a final version of the product that was not dependent on the backend metadata service ... so users could still use it "as is" for their own collections.
There's lots of discussion on this over on the Roon site Roon site for those interested.
Tom, That seems like a very compelling list of features and I have the highest regard for both your and Russ's views, judgement and expertise. I know you are both in favour of Roon but my interest and concern is whether AssetUpnp, not yet much developed, is beginning to eclipse it at much lower cost.
Eclipse? Is this just idle use of words or are there some interesting stats that show a huge number of people jumping on this uPnP app?
I think it is easy to forget what price we all paid to enter the Sooloos club. With a bunch of C10s, TwinStores, Ensembles (that don’t do uPnP) I expect that was quite a decent spend. Far more than the cost of a Roon lifetime licence. And we know that Sooloos is now a sunset product. I would be more concerned about that than the future of Roon.
I was using eclipse to describe only technical matters - and since I do not understand the technical merits of either Roon or its competitors (hence my original question) I was raising a question and not making an assertion.
I have little feel for the sales of Roon or even Sooloos, but I suspect they are low volume, specialist products - only Sonos seem to have become really successful in this streaming marketplace so far (pace Logitech who backed away for reasons I do not know just after I had bought my Squeezebox Boom and Squeezebox Duet!
Perhaps I had better not get Roon for fear of blighting their prospects.
I also use iPeng, for example to get Tidal out of my Squeezebox Boom. Thank goodness for skilled and knowledgeable people who are willing to put their great abilities on public access. I don’t expect people to do this just for their personal satisfaction, but bearing in mind what can be done for little or in some cases even no charge I have instinctive resistance to Roon’s $500 price point. Hence my question about alternatives and exploring what the features are that might sustain Roon against evolving competition.
The implications are that Roon is far too expensive however, after a quick search on Amazon UK I came up with the following which assumes you have no hardware you can utilise for Roon and need/want to buy all new, secondhand equipment is also available on Amazon.
You could of course spec a higher performance NUC at more cost if required but the i3 is closest to the Innuos Zen mini albeit still much faster performance as per the following performance results.
USB CD-ROM drive £20.99 (ROCK supports automatic CD ripping via a USB CD-ROM, if you use dBpoweramp or similar for ripping you could save the cost of this.)
I don't know about the other solutions offered, but the best feature about Roon for me is that, assisted by, but not exclusively because of, its almost seamless integration with Tidal, I am enjoying a much more diverse selection of music than I previously listened to, other than on radio. This diversity is not me choosing other artists etc, but because Roon offers it to me based upon what it thinks I will like and not just a random selection.
The other thing I like about Roon, is that it allows me to use a selection of audio endpoints that I have accumulated over the years. Quite the opposite of what I thought was Sooloos' biggest drawback. If only Sooloos had allowed USB audio to be played from its core and/or store/control devices...
Its too subtle for me to describe, but Roon is much more than a media player, with or without Tidal.
Meridian owner since 1992 Prime & PSU, Focal Elear headphones, Roon (ROCK 8Gi5 NUC), Explorer 1 & 2, F80. 200/203, various Sonos (via Roon).
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