Hi. I arrived here whilst researching an issue we have with a Sonos system we just installed at work. Sonos is great, but there are some issues we weren’t aware of before purchasing and some that are things we’d like to be able to do. Here’s a list. It would be great to find out if Roon would answer some of these questions.
We have Sonos Play 1 speakers, are there any downsides to using Roon with Sonos? Does using Roon affect the quality of SonosNet playback?
Is there a way of limiting the maximum volume independently of the hardware? We have a problem with volume creep, and it’s an open plan office.
Can tracks be normalised as in iTunes and Spotify? Spotify through Sonos doesn’t have this at present.
Does Roon give us back the suggested tunes and personal mixes that Spotify has? This is not available in the Sonos player.
Can certain artists or albums be banned? In other words are there parental controls?
Sorry about all these questions, but there doesn’t appear to be a manual anywhere.
Hi Carl, thanks for your reply. That is very helpful. We’re only on a monthly Spotify subscription, so not tied to it. I’ll investigate the idea of switching to Tidal.
Is there a soft client for Roon? It would be useful if those at work without Sonos speakers on their desks could listen in to the stream on their Macs or PCs using headphones.
Apologies, I see there is. RoonBridge appears to be the thing I’m looking for. Is there a dedicated forum for Bridge? I can’t see one.
Can anyone tell me if it stays in sync with the audio content streaming from any speakers? This may appear to be a strange request, but you may not be familiar with the problems faced when allowing some users to have music when others are against it!
Roon Bridge is headless and used for audio endpoints when user controls are not required / not supported.
If you wish your Mac / PC headphone users to have some control over their zone it would be better to install Roon Remote on those devices.
Have you had a chance too look in the Roon Knowledge base I linked earlier, this section Architecture should give you a better understanding of how Roon’s distributed components interact with each other… (for diagrams follow the pretty marketing material link.
One thing that may be important to your office setup is that each zone in Roon is independent in that the Roon Core can send it a different music stream to all the others, but Roon also support zone grouping … where all the zones in that zone group receive the same music.
However, there is a limitation in that at present Roon Zones can only be grouped with other zones of the same type, meaning for example Sonos zones cannot be grouped with RAAT zones. (see Zone Grouping in the RKB).
How many zones (audio endpoints) will you need? Depending on the numbers, I’m not sure how well Roon would cope with each member in your office having their own zone. One for @Mike to comment one.
You could use the Spotify app itself to play through Sonos, then you have the features of Spotify with the networked speakers. In that scenario, each user is playing their OWN spotfiy account and own playlists
You could have everyone use the Sonos apps that has one or more Spotify accounts registered, then people would be picking from the one Spotify account
there are many other music sources for Sonos
I have used Sonos a lot and am new to Roon, so take with a grain of salt:
Sonos native is more mature and stable (for playing to Sonos speakers), depending on network stability, Roon can drop out over Sonos. Sonos does better to keep it solid (I think Roon is working on this and if your network is good, its not an issue)
Sonos streams directly from one device to the internet and then shares that over its own network among devices. Roon streams from the outside service to the Roon core and then to one or more clients. I *think Roon has a bigger impact on the network traffic, especially if using Tidal Hi Fi vs Spotify (which is not Roon’s fault but I think the TIdal stream gets doubled up effectively).
I think in a shared office setting you might be better with Spotify and Sonos apps, just my two cents.
@Carl Thanks again for your input. I’ve read through the sections on Architecture and Remote, thanks. The fact we can’t group different endpoints probably eliminates Roon Bridge for now. We need one music source piped to all staff in sync. It seem to me that if we’d considered Roon earlier in the process, before investing in Sonos, and before getting staff used to Spotify, we may have been able to use it. I think Roon would introduce an additional layer of complexity for minimal benefit now though.
@RobOK Thanks, that’s really helpful. It seems to me that we’d be better off sticking with Sonos/Spotify for now too.
@Chrislayeruk Thanks for the info, but I don’t think we can change the hardware having only just bought it.