Digital can be harsh depending on the CD mastering. The old redbook stuff especially. I have top grade equipment, and some CDs are a little rough.
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This is the most strange statement that I have ever come across!
Not to me… CD can sound amazing on my system. (Meridian) CD can also sound crap, but that’s the the CD’s fault, its the production and over compression. See loudness wars.
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The equipment is usually not the problem. It’s the source material and mastering/remastering.
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Agreed. The mastering is the most important factor.
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I bookmarked a focus on tracks that have never been played (restricted to certain genres, i.e. no Xmas music). I play that bookmark on shuffle so I always hear songs that I haven’t played. By using shuffle I’m always surprised at the range of music in my library. Some of the juxtapositions can be a little jarring, but it’s never dull. I’m hoping at some time Roon will allow us to edit play counts so if/when I play all my library I can reset the play count to zero and start over.
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So true. I hardly listen to anything I liked when I was in my teens/20s etc. Of course there are a few specific albums or tracks from artists that are excellent and timeless, but I find those to be the exception.
And yet - like many here I am not a fan at all of most of the very samey pop that gets shovelled out, and yet sometimes those samey artists will have their individual on-off moments of inspiration as well, so I cant ignore them completely.
But back to OP - I think the sweet spot of using Roon is you have a library. You get a streaming account with tidal or qobuz that has nothing in it. Roon uses what you still listen to in your library to open up a new world of current music that there a good chance you will like from the services. Stuff that you would never normally discover if (like me) you tend to avoid popular radio like the plague and have become utterly disillusioned by past streaming service attempts at picking music for you (which to be fair seem to have suddenly got a lot better on some in the past year).
The problem with the local library is in many ways it can only ever be as good as the metadata available either in the library or via metadata services. For my purposes I often find this metadata to be poor - ie not informative enough. That isn’t an issue with Roon of course, but rather the services and the publishers. The same is true for streaming services as well.
There have been some issues for many with huge classical box sets and TBH even other small box sets too, but where the source of these correlation problems are I have no idea. I have know search to be oddly slow at time with even a small local library, but I suspect that has been as much down to concurrent searches going on against tidal and qobuz and probably a case of further optimisation of the underlying search engine result selection and ranking etc.
But as indicated, I do not feel Roon is favouring one group over the other. I can point to any aspect of the product and probably say this isn’t being adequately supported if I tried. But thats my limited point of view that represents just me and features I personally care most about and right now and not the bigger picture of feedback trends across the customer base and maybe the broader industry.
A couple of years ago I cared a lot about mobile access, right now - dont care about it at all for eg (for obvious reasons). But maybe in a years time I will again - who knows? Two years ago - NAS library was most important, but now - streaming discover is most import to me.
Needs change as our perspectives change. Buying into as evolving product like this is buying into a vision and to some extent, getting with the program to get the most out of it (at least as long as the train is going where you are enjoying going).
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I’m in full agreement, being “non-dinosaurial“ 
I have noticed a considerable lack of metadata on many of the the relatively recent releases. I do wonder if that’s due to the quantity of new releases in recent years?
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I have a granddaughter for this type of thing!
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That is true. As such it seems unlikely to me that there could be some magic solid state device you can plug in to your playback chain and have it fix the mastering for you.
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I’m interested, but skeptical. A couple of years ago, I remember Schiit was going to come out with a GADGET device that was designed to true the frequency tone response somehow.
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Sounds like MQA in a box.
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Now that you’ve heard the new, which has respectable playing but no new ideas, do your homework and listen to this inimitable groundbreaking album from 1972 if you don’t already know it.
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Fusion jazz, dunno.
I guess it’s good for sitting by the pool, drinking pina coladas. 
Miles Davis not withstanding.
Now now, don’t be lazy and closed-minded. 
Fusion was in it’s infancy at this time.
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Wow! This thread exploded!
And it led me to create two new threads purely for fun.
The first one is here No Good Music: Prove Me Wrong! (tongue firmly in cheek).
There’s been so many interesting posts. About 10% of them are added to my library, but that says something about my music tastes rather than the quality of the music.
The second one came shortly after that. The 30 Day Music Challenge. An album posted each day and, provided you listen to it, the chance to vote and weigh in about whether this is good, garbage, or something in between. Six days in and we’ve spanned 1959-2019, country, classical, jazz, pop etc… So check it out under music. Day 6 and Day 5 still open for voting as I write this.
I’m aggregating the stats as we go, and I’ll try to provide a summary at the end of the month (for entertainment value if nothing else).
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The guy in your Wiki link is a different Avishai Cohen. They are both Jazz Musicians, both really talented, but this one is a bass player. I discovered Avishai the horn player when looking for releases by Avishai the bass player.
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I heard “Return to Forever” when it first came out. I thought it was kind of derivative compared with “A.R.C.” or Corea’s work with Miles. I’ve become fonder of “Return to Forever” (much later) but when I think of innovators working today like Wadada Leo Smith, Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, Jonathan Finlayson, Mary Halvorson, Arúan Ortiz, Tyshawn Sorey, Kit Downes, Jeff Parker, James Brandon Lewis, Miguel Zenón, Tomeka Reid, …, and lots more, I leave “Return to Forever” for background music.
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Well, there you have it. As they say: There’s no accounting for taste.
Yesterday, I listened (in the background) to the Iyer/Smith album that someone recommended in this topic. It only broke through what I was doing to demand attention when it was annoying me.
It’s good to be derivative of Miles. I enjoy A.R.C too, similar vibe but completely different band.