Audirvana vs. Roon

Hello Hanno,

I think this forum’s language is english. I hope you understand, because I have a question to you:

Do you use HQPlayer with or without upsampling?

I have been a very long term Audirvava user, and had two Roon trials. Both of them came up with the very same result. Audirvana was better in terms of sound quality, hands down!

Setup iMac->Curious USB Cable->Mutec MC-3 + USB

The biggest part I was missing in Audirvana was browsing through music and exploring new routes or simply just getting surprised by hidden gems.

So I gave Roon a bit more focus on its intended use. Running Roon of Rock with a very nice well speced passive cooled Nuc and a Lumin U1. Comparing the two, no contest Roon wins!

If I stream both directly against the U1 with their different protocols it is becoming very close, sound wise Roon still having my preference. So for me it boils down to a very simple formula.

Audirvana: Simple single room setup with modest cost. If you know what you are looking for in terms of music, you can’t go wrong.

Roon: More complexity and cost, but multi room / multi source. Experiencing music at it’s best with no compromise in sound quality.

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Are you using any DSP plug ins with Audirvana? @Miller

No, I am not a big fan of using any kind of plugins. The only thing I do is upsampling 16/44. Currently 90% of my listening is HighRes anyway.

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Difference is a strong statement from my point of view, hence I called it preference. It may sound silly but even on Gbics I found a preference.

After several months of use, I can say that for me Roon is the less qualitative solution in term of sound quality compared to Audirvana & the native Naim App (at least on my Naim).

Sure, it has a nice way to display the contents and provides smart suggestions but it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do at the most basic level : properly aggregate contents ! Lots of albums aren’t detected from my NAS and it’s a purely arbitrary (you have to force the rescan many times and eventually an album it didn’t detect a week ago will appear).

A bug like random reboot app when using an iPhone and the insanely high price tag for a “dysfunctional” app make me regret the investment. Perhaps Roon’s team will fixe these things, but at the moment I can’t recommend the investment to anyone.

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All the talk of Audirvana, I loaded it ( I mistakenly bought a license in a fit of madness) and started using the iOS app.

I lasted all of 7 minutes, what a mess , how do people manage it.

I must be missing something :see_no_evil:

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The iOS app is just a remote for the main app installed on your computer - it does not have an autonomous function of its own.

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I know that , but the remote app is what I am going to use. I have a Sever - Renderer set up with a Cambridge Audio CXN . My server is in a completely different room to my CXN so I want to use it as a standard, Server - Renderer - Controller system . I never use my Core PC to do anything other than maintenance and importing , after that is all done from my listening spot with an iPad

My comment is that I find the Remote completely wanting when it comes to music selection , its slow, under featured and generally not too friendly

I appreciate some people think the sound is superior to Roon but from my point of view I couldn’t use it for long enough to notice the whole experience was off putting

I use Audirvana in a streaming context with HRA only. Useage with local files is a cumbersome experience. If you have experience with Roon there is a high chance you reject Audirvana, because it is very basic in comparison. I never could detect a sound difference. One or the other being better or worse, even though I tried. I hope HRA will be integrated into Roon as a streaming service. This would be the perfect outcome for me.

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I’m of the same opinion as @miklats.

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Same here - and that’s the sad thing: if HRA Streaming were integrated into Roon, we would have no need to resort to Audirvana to stream HRA content to the DACs.

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195 posts were merged into an existing topic: Audirvana Studio

I have been Audirvana user since april 2012 when I bought my first Aud. license. I followed closely Roon development over the years. Roon 1 year license bought just 45 days ago and trialed versions from 1.6. Now about sound quality, Roon 1.6 was on par with Audirvana and not at the same level with 1.7. If the sound quality on 1.8 would have been the same as the previous version (1.7) I wouldn’t use it even if it was for free. The sound on 1.8, in my systems (all 3 of them, only local 150k track library) the sound is perfect, has more weight, I feel it much fuller than with Audirvana 3.5 and Studio, which to my ear sounds tiring in a short time. The only setup which reaches the sound level of Roon 1.8 is Minimserver + Mconnect (Mac/IOS) but I will pay the price every year for Roon due to great library management if the sound remains the same in the future.

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I really don’t understand these discussions about sound quality anymore. Let’s assume for a moment your DAC does proper asynchronous processing and both audirvana and roon are able to send bit perfect streams via usb (since years really). What remains? Yes of course noise and other unwanted signals via USB. Putting for instance a good galvanic usb isolator in between gets us rid of this for sure. What remains then to the software? Nothing I’d say. Driving the DAC directly via USB from a Windows Core with everything (WLAN, graphics, …) of course influences the sound. Some DACs already have proper galvanic isolation and reclocking - I wonder what audirvana or roon then possibly can do in terms of sound if everything else is the same. DSP measures to colorate the music for our ears is something to exclude here. I just use a wired ropieee bridge with intona usb isolator with a very good low noise power supply. The DAC is reclocking. I did many experiments based on that setup. The sound is just perfect. No matter what software I use to feed it with as long the signal path remains bit perfect.

OS and software latency maybe…
I’ve seen several audio OS and software that emphasize latency (especially for the USB connection).

bit perfect stream + reclocking in DAC (asynchronous). What latency could possibly apply? Is that theoretically even possible? That confuses me.

I’m not an expert, but you can find info on the manufacturers’ websites:

https://euphony-audio.com/https://euphony-audio.com/

…and others.

Thank you!
And sorry for my bad english…
It sounds to me as if there is no USB delivery to an asynchronous DAC in this setup thus clocking and jitter depend indeed on the “streamer”. Therefore I would assume for asynchronous setup the quality of the DAC reclocking and processing (maybe also upsampling) is the only important thing if no other dirty signals are submitted via USB.
In other setups in which soundcards are involved or a synchronous digital signal is submitted to a DAC I found Windows is not really good in doing this. For that reason audirvana provides a set of additional measures to get Windows focusing on music reproduction mainly.

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I just received a Nucleus Plus, and the only aspect of Audirvana 3.5 that I prefer is that I could create custom playlists by historical periods (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Contemporary, plus a separate one for guitar and piano, but I don’t seem to be able to create anything similar so far) and Audirvana kept Qobuz tracks together in playlists until I clicked on an album cover, then it showed the individual tracks. Roon separates out the album tracks as soon as I open the playlist.