I don’t know that attracting a wholly different audience is the desire of Roon. At the moment they have 2 products - the UI with the search and signal path play, and the RAAT infrastructure. If they stay true to that and build a portable nucleus - will it appeal to current users (who most folks on this site are)? I reckon so. But that doesn’t give you a huge new addressable market. Would it expand their current market? I think so. Part of the beauty of roon, for me, is it is price-tag agnostic in terms of hardware. It doesn’t only play nicely with high end, expensive stuff. So have a small ROCK that someone starting out with RPi based end points can use and enjoy. When you’re buying £30 RPis it’s all relative.
I don’t think roon should cheapen their offering. You’re paying for the experience. But they can lower the barrier of entry through their ability to move music from A to B elegantly and agnostically
I haven’t thought through the mechanics for remote and mobile, but can say definitely it is a big need for me.
I am mostly a streamer, limited physical files (they are old “high quality” mp3 - gasp! If anyone remembers something called “Uber” standard for ripping MP3), so my perspective might be different.
Mainly I want my Roon collection and playlists (and tags, and likes, etc) to follow me and I can re-engage my playlists via streaming. I view Roon as a layer above one or more music sources, hopefully more sources in the future. LIke a Bluenote or Sonos, but not tied to hardware.
A big opportunity Roon should tap into more is Community
Sharing song links (tidal at this point) into the community here, sharing playlists where they can be started up in Roon from the community - in short term adding a Tidal link to the sharing image that links thru Roon
Review infrastructure where I can optionally pull in other user reviews (maybe by Genre tags)
Following Users (again through the community) to pull in that users top songs (if offered)
Even more meta data and stories about artists – curated links on artists, crowd sourced
Yes, there is a large mass of people who will never be interested, they are not what I’m talking about. A brief summary of my thesis is that somebody who is most demanding in terms of lifestyle, who favors a manual-focus Leica and a 1996 stick shift Porsche and cast iron pans and craft beer and is on a first name basis with the butcher, is today likely to rate mobile access as mandatory. Mobile not just in terms of a phone with ear buds, but in the general sense I described, working late at the office or in a business trip hotel or on vacation. This is an interesting target market.
Quality is not one-dimensional. I can get a very powerful desktop computer, but a powerful-enough laptop is better. A mirrorless Fuji X replaces the Canon DSLR because images are as good and it weighs less.
If you read the commentary on MQA, from people who have actually listened to it, there is a lot of discussion about whether the difference is audible. In my own evaluation (my gear is Meridian, so Roon does MQA for me) I found exactly that: maybe the difference is notable, or is it because of a remaster, or the volume is 1 dB higher, or confirmation bias. I rapidly lost interest. Roon helps me discover new musicians, that is enormously valuable.
About cloud resources: network is adequate in most areas, even cellular, people do stream movies; but not all areas, that is why we want to support local storage as well, maybe a combination. Cloud storage: Adobe Lightroom has a license fee of $10/month, like Roon, and they just added 1 TB of cloud storage for an additional $10, a reasonable comparison with Roon, most of us have less than 1 TB of music. And that price is higher than many cloud services. So if Roon for $10 is reasonable, how much is it worth to have Roon in the office and in the summer house and on vacation and in the car?
The concern I have with streaming from home is not bandwidth (24 bits x 2 channels x 96k = 5 Mbps) but reliability and troubleshooting.
To me, the issue going forward is: What will the other vendors do?
What if Apple Music, Spotify, et al offered lossless streaming and MQA streaming? Both Apple Music and Spotify have pretty good search engines and artist information available. Also pretty good cross platform support and portability.
The DAC is the digital equivalent of the phono cartridge. Some are better than others and each has its own sound characteristics. And…there are a lot more folks using moderately priced DACs than high-end DACs, even in pretty expensive hi-fi rigs. If other vendors can provide lossless streaming, how does Roon move forward?
I’ve got many albums in Roon that remain unidentified, so I see the metadata as a non-argument and all the streaming services have large libraries available. I’ve owned substantial numbers of LPs and CDs and my personal libraries can’t compare with the offerings of the streaming services.
Search capabilities are important, including being able to deliver results even with inevitable mis-spellings. Reliability is important—switch it on and it works. I hope Roon succeeds and moves forward. At this point to me, it is the most elegant and best sounding of all the possibilities for my needs. Not the most simple, but the best.
However, not all my family cares as much about the sound and would enjoy a bit more trouble-free operation. For example, Pi’s running RAAT sometimes don’t reconnect to the network following a router restart and the TIDAL library is the same. I can’t restart the Mac mini headless server from a remote device without signing into the server host from another computer on the network. This stuff doesn’t happen often, but I’d say that it occurs at least once a month.
I don’t have the answers, and I’m glad that I don’t need to figure this out moving forward. I’m appreciative of the great work of the Roon staff and wish all the best going into the future.
The sharing aspect would be really useful. The “share” capabilities are great in Roon. With the Tidal URL it doesn’t make sense to embed it in the image that share creates - because someone can’t click it. So on the share screen dialog having the option to copy the song url to the clipboard would be handy.
One of the most active threads on the community is “what are you listening to now?”. The one about reference tracks is getting pretty busy too. The challenge is that with the number of posts, it is easy to go see, quite literally, what are you listening to NOW. But someone may have listening to a hidden gem last week. The forum is useful in that it can pick up where you left off on a thread (a feature that kindle also does well). It is a feature - as all features should be - that is designed around why someone would want to do something. But while it works for Kindle, and I don’t want that feature to do more, on the forum it would be better to be able to filter the remaining posts better…
The point being, the forum isn’t actually the best place for the most active thread. People say “data is the new oil”. I disagree. We know what to do with oil (plus it is a finite resource). Data is an infinite resource, that we don’t fully know what to do with it. And the more of it we have, the less sense we make of it.
Metadata is the new hybrid drive (sorry, battling to find a better fit for it). Metadata helps us make sense of the data. But metadata takes on many forms - a lot of metadata that roon uses is technical. File format, bitrate, sample rate, location… things roon needs to make sense of the data (music) in order to deliver it to you. Some metadata is around context - used for filtering and searching. Tags, genre and so on. Some metadata is around usage - history of songs played, search phrases, possibly the sequence of operations (as in I ended up listening to artist x, because I found them in the credits of artist y that it was produced by z who also produced x…). The usage data is key to making effective recommendations. If users were willing to share data either anonymously or semi-anonymously (although that opens cans of worms like GDPR) - roon could mine it, and the social aspect of “what are you listening to?” could move to within roon. Like the sharing - we all go on the forum, see something that interests us, and then go open roon and search for it. Why the round-trip? Sharing is great for things like social media - but for sharing for roon users, roon is the best place for it. So for me, I’d like to see parts of the forum move to inside roon itself.
While on the subject of active threads on here and giving credit - full credit to @AndersVinberg for this one. The feature requests often get little response here, or tend to get loads of responses. The ones that are active tend to be emotive ones where you end up with opposing camps". I love this thread - we are having good, sensible debate about a big issue here. Keep it going!
The camera analogy, and market, is a great yardstick. The traditional vendors there - eg Nikon, Canon - are struggling to stay relevant and having to restructure their businesses accordingly. They try sell top-end equipment to a market that doesn’t really care for it (or not enough people to be sustainable). But the solution to that isn’t features. The race for features is partly what got them in this mess. For years they have got away with being lazy and rather than looking at the users, and innovating accordingly, they had a feature war with each other. Some of the requests on this forum are similar - player x has this feature… personally I prefer looking at ancillary technologies like kindle for inspiration than other players. Kindle is about delivering content to you seamlessly and is built around your consumption of that content. Kindle works because they get why people want to use their devices. When they came out people decried them - the death of books, I prefer the feel of a real book etc. We did the same thing when the weaving loom was invented. It is progression… people decry Amazon and the “death of the high street”. We get sentimental about the high street and Amazon is the big bad ogre. Amazon gives us convenience - what you want, where you want it, when you want it. Without leaving your sofa. Amazon didn’t kill the high street. Supermarkets did. They became one stop shops and the high street died then - cynic in me says the voices behind “Amazon is killing the high street” are probably the supermarkets. Amazon is killing the big corporate supermarket. Maybe we should be saying “Kindle. It’s putting monks out of work” forgetting that the printing press had already done that.
Back to cameras - the big vendors were in a feature war with each other to build more megapixels, more focus points, more fps… and along came mirrorless. They changed their focus to have the same feature war on 2 fronts, rather than understanding why people were attracted to mirrorless. Mirrorless was an evolution when along came the revolution - the smart phone. It’s a toy. A gimmick. You can’t get decent photos on a sensor that small. Low light performance must be terrible. Software can’t make up for optics (throw in debate about merits of upsampling audio…). The traditional vendors tried the FUD route - we don’t really see it as a competitor, our customers are more discerning… yet here we are with Nikon “celebrating” 100 years, I say “celebrating” because they’re in a pretty precarious position at the moment and having to cull products and cut staff numbers. Turns out the best camera for you is the one you have. A friend once posted “Guys, I am looking to buy a camera, which one should I get?”. No context given - no what or why. Yet the answers flooded in. “Get a Canon. They’re great.”. The question was silly. The answers were absurd. I have a Nikon1 v3. Read any forum - you can see how rubbish the v3 is. Lack of features, poor IQ etc. Yet it lives in my car. My D5 lives in my cupboard. I really can’t remember the last time I took it out. I went to a rugby game at Twickenham and the security staff were hassling folks who had professional looking cameras - the v3 doesn’t look professional. Once inside the 70-300 lens I had on it gave me an effective 810mm. It was brilliant. And when I got home I emailed some pictures to my brother. I didn’t blow them up and put them on the wall. I have a DJI Spark. Apparently it is rubbish. It doesn’t even do 4K. Read the forums. That is a “deal breaker” for people. I love it - it is the longest selfie stick I know of (selfie sticks have 1 redeeming feature… they conduct lighting). Ok, I don’t love it for selfies and don’t take them. But it does panos. And the beauty is you don’t have to fly it - it takes control out of your hands, and for the use case I have, it is brilliant. Go on holiday and people say “what is it like there?”. A photo comes out flat. Videos seem 1 dimensional. Pop this thing up and shoot a quick video of the area. The smaller the better… because once again I email it via hotel wifi to my family. I have a Phantom 4. Sitting at home. I think it is next to the D5…
The point isn’t “sharing is the new king” or even really that roon needs to abandon the pursuit of quality for convenience. But it comes down to use case and the best experience for what we need, where we need it, when we need it. Driven by why we need it. Often for me it is the workflow.
Anders, all those points taken. The only one I disagree with is the comment on the perceived quality increase MQA provides (or not). The feedback I’ve read from people who have actually listened to MQA on fully capable systems, e.g., on Meridian Unplugged from most SE owners, is highly positive in favour of MQA. Most reviewers seem to be positive about it also.
I was skeptical myself until I did a side by side demo through SEs with MQA vs non-MQA with the same master, when I was deciding whether to upgrade my 818 to v3 and buy into 7200s or ditch digital and start buying vinyl again. To my ears the difference was not subtle, in fact it’s not all that subtle through my 7200.2s either. I’d go so far as to say, all other things being equal, it’s capable of being the source material for the best digital reproduction I’ve heard.
If you don’t think it’s that big a deal, that’s fair enough, each to his own, but the implication in your comment is that most people who have heard it feel the same, and I don’t think that’s true.
P.S., your 8KSEs will be wasted on non-MQA material, so I’ll be happy to do you a huge favour and swap them (free of charge) for my 7200.2s
Ah MQA! It’s like drug studies and the placebo effect… does it really matter if it makes a difference or not?
I’ve got the S2 Digital and a decent set of cans plugged in to it. In roon I wish I could more easily identify the MQA albums because for me I’ll lie here and find something to listen to… then find it isn’t MQA and think “I’d probably enjoy something else more”. I’m actively bypassing non MQA stuff.
Is it better? Who knows. I prefer it. Maybe it is a placebo - I think it is real, so I make it real. It doesn’t really matter if that is the case. I think it sounds better. And that’s all that counts. For someone who doesn’t - that’s great, and for them that’s all that counts.
O/T, but re: cameras, I made the move from Canon to Fuji because the image quality was actually better at that point - the 5D Mkii had horrible dynamic range and banding when pushing shadows (I needed video features at the time), whereas the X-T1 was practically ISO-less. I then discovered that the Fuji primes were easily as good as some of my older Leica primes had been, in terms of practical results (rather than shooting test charts). Plus the Fuji system was about half the weight and size.
I then tried an Olympus OM-D E-M1. What a camera. I’ve been a photographer as long as I can remember and it blew me away. I had the quality and ergonomics, to all intents and purposes, I’d had in a Nikon D700 a few years earlier, with a weight around a third, or far less for the whole system with three or four of the jewel-like, and relatively cheap Oly/Pana primes. And it had IBIS which really worked. Little picture-taking powerhouse.
My iPhone sometimes takes OK photos in perfect conditions. When the light becomes more interesting, it’s pretty useless for serious photography really. I’ve printed a couple of A4s because the subject was too good not to use the shot, but they’re quite muddy compared to what I’d get in the same conditions with one of my dedicated cameras.
True. But your iPhone is always in your pocket. And it’s always tethered to the device you can share from. For me I have expensive kit (D5, prime lenses etc) sitting at home. And if I wanted to print a poster for home - I wouldn’t use the iPhone. But that’s the 1% use case. 99% of the time it is “happy snaps” which are shared with family who are scattered around the globe.
With roon the point isn’t “roon should be an iPhone” or “roon should be a D5”. But that the successful technologies don’t focus on features - but on the use cases and the experiences. Software should be an enabler. Support our workflow (and for each of us that flow will be different - my listening workflow includes making coffee!), rather than make us adapt our flow to fit the software.
The pursuit of features is a rush to the bottom. Like the traditional camera manufactures have found.
Personally for me the deal breaker for roon and why I can’t use it is that it doesn’t support 48.75/970,2k audio… No idea what that is, but the numbers are bigger, and that .75 of a bit makes a massive difference. Probably.
Thank you, I just fear that shipping would be prohibitive…
Wrt MQA, it may be my 16-bit ears.
In any case, I put MQA on the shelf once I did room correction — they are not compatible, and RC is yuuge. We will see, I hope Roon manages to combine them.
Yes, I could understand how RC, done right and in the right room, might overshadow any one audio format over another.
What kind of RC are you using? MRC, or are you working higher up the frequency band than that? I’ve been interested myself, but with previous attempts (even with a TACT a few years back) I was never quite happy. I’d give it another go at some point though.
I’ve written about it: I was never successful with MRC, not very happy with REW calculating PEQ filters for Roon DSP, but Acourate calculated a convolution for Roon DSP and it is excellent. Have done other rooms as well.
For myself, Roon delivers what I want now. Great quality audio in my home with all its inherent benefits.
I don’t listen to music on the move, that’s Radio time. BBC Radio, Talk Radio. Politics, current affairs, Radio drama etc.
I get home and I want and get Quality music on my very competent system. It hasn’t got to be the best, it’s a jaw dropper for most people though.
I Must be representative of a lot of people out there but maybe not on this forum.
P.S.
This is not to say Roon should not develope for a wider audience and this thread has been very interesting and thought provoking.
Chris
That is true only at the breakthrough of a new technology, say the Walkman, the iPod, the first iPhone. Then there are more entrants in the market and it becomes a features war, often not desirable features (see the bloat of MS Office!)
I think it is not always easy to know what is a must have feature for product evolution or a non essential feature.
For Roon and MQA you get different points of view of course.
