Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat Is Roon Doomed Like Sooloos?

If that was the case, I would feel strongly compelled to justify iPod, Squeezebox, Sonos, Sooloos and Roon.

So here goes

iPod - first foray into music streaming. Great alternative to carrying CD's on long journeys, but storage was expensive so I ripped a limited amount of my most played albums to MP3. Was not a replacement for CD's.

Squeezebox - same limitation for storage, but repurposed the music library I had already ripped. Nice UI and digital out so for convenience, I could use it instead of playing CD's. But didn't change how I listened to things. Bought a dedicated PC to run Squeezeserver.

Sonos - starting augmenting original MP3's with lossless FLAC so better quality, but still no replacement for DVD-A and some CD's. Not needing dedicated server was good and multiple zones was nice. But quality did not give what I wanted and was missing hires.

Sooloos - gave me hires and changed the way that I listened to music allowing it to pick some of my tracks, until some of the functionality was removed. But it was a standalone box which I left switched off for much of the time.

Sooloos 5 - I was an alpha tester from when it was to be next gen Sooloos. This eventually became Roon. I felt it didn't improve much on what I already had and I couldn't see through the constant changes and missing features so I quit the alpha program as I felt that I could not give it the attention that it needed. But it did get me thinking about how things should work, especially wrt how I listen to music.

Roon - I really held off committing to this until late last year. I wanted to see how it evolved from when I alpha tested Sooloos 5 and how it improved on what Sooloos offered me. The trigger was its support of my legacy Sonos kit. I wished that I had jumped ship earlier as, purchasing a low power dedicated box, I was happy to leave it running 24/7. Which meant that I now had music on demand. Basically, Roon gave me the best of everything that I had before, and more besides, all in a nice seamlessly integrated package. The only criticism, lack of volume integrating with F80 whilst maintaining full resolution output - and that shortcoming is built into (or not as the case may be) the F80.

I could use free or cheap solutions, and indeed have done for stop gaps, but it is so nice to have a package that is robust (only had one issue ever with Roon, fixed with reboot of core), flexible and just works nicely (albeit not always intuitively). Thanks to Ratbert and his quickstart assistance and about 30 minutes of my time, I can now just enjoy listening to the music and a much more diverse variety than I previously did. Oh, and not have to keep procrastinating on what options are out there and whether I made the right choice; priceless. I should have done it when Roon first came out, then it would have more than paid for itself by now.