Sometimes it is good to be a squeaky wheel…
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Good for him/her. Maybe Roon is reaching out quietly…I’ve had my lifetime subscription for almost four years. It was a great purchase.
Life is a mystery indeed.
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I upgraded my Roon membership to lifetime yesterday. I had paid for a yearly on 10/28 and was eligible for the $499 price. -Glad I heard about this in the PSA forum and got in under the wire. The Roon people got back to me quickly after I emailed them. -Very nice!
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You were making some negative comments about product sound quality in your posts. That made zero sense.
Glad you were able to secure the membership though.
I’ve always felt that Roon, when used on my Mac, has inferior sound quality to the other players I’ve used, Amarra Luxe, HQPlayer, and Audirvana. I only use Roon with HQPlayer because of the sound quality issues.
I understand Roon sounds better on its own in different setups than mine, like on a NUC etc. Based on my extensive experience with Mac based music players, I do feel Roon, given its extreme price, ought to sound better than it does. The other players I’ve listed cost much less.
When it comes to library management, Roon is lightyears beyond anything else.
I’m not the only one who has this opinion on Roon’s SQ. There are many who use HQPlayer with Roon because of this issue. Our own Paul has expressed concern over Roon SQ in these forums.
It’s simply an opinion, there’s no right or wrong to it. But it’s one held by many and certainly makes sense to those who feel that way.
Audirvana sounds very good at my computer listening station imac. Probably better than Roon. That said, at endpoints throughout the house it doesn’t, and by no means does either program sound poor. But your comments about poor sound quality were bizzare, made in concert with you being upset about the Roon lifetime subscription price increase. I commented to you in that thread, stating if it sounded bad, I wouldn’t even purchase an annual subscription, never mind a lifetime one.
I think Roon sounds good, but I have good supporting equipment, and a strong network to feed it. Octave might be a good fit down the road.
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What’s bizarre about finding Roon’s sound quality a bit lacking compared to other players? Many feel that way. It’s just an opinion. I use HQPlayer to elevate Roon’s SQ and am very happy with the results. I do think that the most expensive player on the market ought to sound better on its own in order to justify its high price. Of course, you’re welcome to have a different opinion, and being different than my own does not make your opinion bizarre, it’s just different.
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Fair enough. Maybe was it contradictory and not bizzare, but either way, your opinion is yours and mine is mine. Cheers.
PS: I also use HQPlayer 3 with my microrendu NAA and Roon Ready with my Bryston BDPs (2).
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I revisited Audirvana the other day, it really does sound great. But I’m too accustomed to Roon’s dynamic library world, and on my Mac, Audirvana is sluggish when scrolling, and the iPad remote is just ok. Roon just works in every regard.
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TBH, Bryston BDP MPD is the best SQ that I have (not by a large margin, but slightly) but the software is clunky and available only on my Bryston endpoints (viewed via ipad). I prefer using the Brystons as endpoints versus stand alone players. Readily available BDP-1s on the used market go for under $1k. Bryston is a Canadian company and they built stuff like battle tanks. Bought one in 2011, and a second one last year.
They seem to be discouraging lifetime membership purchases
No “seem” about it! Roon came out and said the point of raising the price was to discourage lifetime subscription purchases. In fact, they are still selling more lifetime subscriptions at the new price than they want. The comment was made that they did not raise the price enough.
It worked on me!
First World problem.
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I’m not sure why they didn’t just discontinue the lifetime price entirely? It would’ve mitigated the hubbub in the Roon forums and eliminated the loss producing lifetime licenses while avoiding the PR hit they’re taking now.
I still don’t understand how a $500, and now $700 lifetime license causes them to lose money. None of the other computer based music playback software companies have gone the subscription route and their price ranges from way less, to way way way less than Roon. Audrivana costs $74 and they have major upgrades every couple of years that cost $40. It would take 30 years at the rate to equal Roon’s $700 fee. And A+ sounds every bit as good as Roon, just lacks the library panache.
The only thing I can deduce is Roon seems to have a number of executives, VP’s, COO, CFO, etc that need large salaries, just a guess. But I do struggle to understand how $700 for album sorting software that provides no musical content, thus no royalty fees to pay, could equal a loss for any company, unless they are very inefficiently structured.
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Roon said why on their forum. It’s because some hardware vendors are still providing lifetime licenses with certain hardware purchases. Roon needs to address that first.
Roon’s services require a bunch of services running constantly on the Internet (or in the cloud if you prefer). These services require computer hardware. The more customers they get, the more hardware they need running on the internet. Roon has to pay for these services and hardware continually. Roon has to have people managing these services. They have support personnel. They have management. This is not a small one-man shop like Audirvana or Signalyst. Roon needs a continual revenue stream to pay for these services. the charge for the annual service pays for these services.
This stuff should be kind of obvious…
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Roon’s sound quality has been subpar compared to many other players and they all cost much less than Roon. The SQ is regardless of if Roon runs on a commercial or non-commercial (DIY) servers - for example, the Innous server native player sounds better than when Roon is run on the same. This has been reported by many users in other forums as well.
I think Roon’s recent goal is more on the mass market share than catering the audiophiles. The only reason I kept going back to Roon is just because their library management and UI has been next to none.
I agree with all that you wrote, it’s certainly part of the story. Another part is the the Roon folks have their roots in the Meridian’s megabucks world. I’m sure Roon has fees to pay for all that you mentioned, but Roon is still really expensive.
Roon sounds just fine using a quality endpoint. No worse than MPD, DLNA, Audirvana, or JRiver. I prefer HQPlayer because of the filters and noise shapers though.
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