A good summary. Thank you.
I might add a few "unfortunately"s, too:
Unfortunately, if youâre going offline with your phone for a while, thereâs no way to tell Roon to copy a group of songs to that phone for offline access.
Unfortunately, thereâs no simple way to hook your turntable up so that Roon can hear, and forward, whatâs playing on it.
Unfortunately, thereâs no way to cast music on your phone to Roon via Bluetooth.
Each of these will be a deal-breaker for some set of users, and it should be easier to find it out up front.
(Parenthetically, and off-topic: the more I learn about the Roon ecology, the more surprised I am that no enterprising hardware start-up has built the âinput deviceâ, two flavors of which could handle the last two points. I suppose the Internet Radio capability in Roon which enables it is still too new?)
An upper-middle-aged guy went into a Best Buy and asked a young man if the had an integrated amp with a phono input, he wanted to give it to his mother so she could hook up her turntable. A long pause. âYour mother is a DJ?â
I donât think Roon will ever handle any analog sourcesâŠnor do I think it should.
Vinyl is hot again. My high-school niece wanted nothing more than a decent turntable for her collection.
This is excellent.
Made me wonder, why didnât I write that?
Specifically, what is it about your advice that I donât like?
I realized it is an easy way to set up for a trial, but it is not simple for the long run.
Easy vs. simple. Whatâs the difference?
It isnât simple because it involves a computer. And that computer needs care and feeding â management, updates, security. Ok, if it is your standard computer you need to do that anyway, so thatâs not a burden. But the computer may not be available when you want to play music. First, you have to boot it and log in. But it may be busy doing some heavy processing, Photoshop or video rendering or printing a report or doing a backup. Or it may be installing the latest OS update. It may even be out if the house, if a family member has brought it to work or school or Starbucks.
Ok, a little silly, but just a little. Those things happen. And they donât happen with an FM tuner.
I dislike computers for playing music. (And I made a 45 year career out of them.) I have discussed my preference for the appliance model elsewhere. Maybe Iâm too pessimistic, most people do live with computers these days, without difficulty, even if they donât love them.
It doesnât matter. Two different approaches to lowering barriers. And we do agree on not introducing the tweaking too early.
Couldnât have put it better myself!
In the two years of a proud Roon lifetimer I have never stubbed my toe against the advices forum members are giving each other. On the contrary.
But posts like this, in Dutch I would say: pedant.
Thanks for this thread. Iâve been using Roon for over a year, but I consider myself a newbie, mostly because I am not of the computer literate generation. I realize that Roon doesnât have printed users manual, but relies on this website as their manual, but also as a communication and information exchange, with Roon staff monitoring and participating. Roon is also very flexible and that adds to its complexity. I solved the complexity issue for setting up Roon for my needs (interfacing with HQP particularly for multichannel mch files) by hiring a consultant who built my computer which was powerful enough to do the upconverting of mch files using Roon and HQP and my mch DAC. I really donât have any idea what settings he used so that everything works, and I hope that any revisions in Roon or HQP donât mess up the settings.
One suggestion is that when using abbreviations or acronyms, that you define them somewhere, or at least check in Google to see whether there is a good explanation for the abbreviation or acronym.
I was able to learn what a Roon endpoint was from a friend who uses Roon endpoint. I wasnât sure whether I had a Roon endpoint or not until he explained it to me, that I didnât.
Thanks, especially to all the people willing to give their time to help all of us newbies.
I have a little bit of sympathy with the OP, but Iâm Iâm not sure it needed the wall of text to tell everyone what we already know: that forums (and hifi forums are no different) are absolutely stuffed to the gills with hyperbole.
Eventually you have to find that out for yourself, because youâll never get a consensus on what is and what doesnât constitute self-important arm-waving. And in a way thatâs good because we learn empirically and ultimately make our own value judgements rather than being led by the nose.
Anything that tries to âforceâ the issue is just standing next to King Canute.
Thatâs a new one to me. What does it mean? Other than what I can guess from context.
Youâre pissing in the wind, m8.
To use the vernacular.
Not that I agree (or disagree) with his use / context, as I donât care either way⊠but for information:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=king+canute
Urban Dictionary never fails to teach and entertain
Ahem, mine was the classical reference!
LOL. Awkward
This forum never fails to educate and entertain.
Agreed. Too much advice is plain wrong. Recommendations to upgrade cables due to poor component performance is always wrong. If a device doesnât work properly with ordinary cables then it simply doesnât work properly. Equipment is supposed to work without being extremely finicky. Attributing magical properties to bits of wire simply because components are poorly performing is probably the most common bad advice given.
The biggest push-back comment I get about Roon from both newbies and from experienced audiophiles thinking about network audio is the cost of the license. For some reason they care less about the cost of the gear than they do about paying Roon for the product. I like to respond by asking if they ever used Microsoft Office and if so how much did that cost them or their employer? I also ask them if they would like to not be paid for their work. âBut there are free solutions!â they say. And I reply that they get what they pay for.