@alex_wood
Can a house guest pick up your iPad and quickly find the music they want to hear (then play it, pause it, adjust the volume, etc., for more than one zone) without much of a learning curve? Circa 1980, most hifi systems were about that easy to use … if you ignore the need to clean vinyl disks and occasionally replace turntable needles/belts, thread reel-to-reel tapes, adjust FM antennas, etc.! Those chores aside, they were more-or-less family-friendly appliances if all you wanted to do was play an album or listen to your favorite radio station.
You forgot to mention cassettes - in the early 1980’s cassette sales overtook LP sales. And cassettes sounded terrible, way worse than even 128kps mp3 or even online radio streams. Easy to use, yes but hard to listen to.
8 Track was the simplest. All you had to do was stick in it in the player, listen to a song or two, and then pull out the unwound tape from between the capstan and the heads. Easy peasy!
What problems did you expect to have?
For non dedicated audio room I like the Vanatoo line of active speakers. Has a bunch of inputs. - RCA,USB,Optical and bluetooth
I usually have two source connected - pi/optical and tinkerboard/usb.
The airplay & bluetooth as a source keep the uptime close to 100%. If all else fails connect to the speaker and beam the music.
Future: Setup a icecast server connected to the core and start up roon radio. Get a internet capable radio and play this radio station.
You should have invested in a Nachamichi
I had 3 over the years , apart from tape hiss they were virtually impossible to tell from vinyl
That system was Quad 34, 405, Quad ESL 63 and an LP12 , Ittok, Troika mix , pretty high fi
The CR7 was the pinnacle
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Yes, sound quality has progressed leaps and bounds from the days of cassette tapes. Audiophiles still fret about treble glare, time smearing, etc. … but tape hiss and radio static are pretty much things of the past.
However, in starting this thread, I wanted to focus on ease-of-use, not SQ. I think it is challenging these days to make a $3k-$5k digital music system as easy-to-use (or “family friendly”) as a typical component hifi system was circa 1980. I’d like to see multi-room synchronized playback, for example, be almost as easy and reliable as operating a household lamp from two different switches. On my system, it’s not. If I handed a house guest the controls and left on errands, I’m afraid I’d return to a Sorcerer’s Apprentice situation.
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Perhaps the perceived lack of ease of use of a Roon setup when compared with the component hifi system of yore is just the lack of standardized user interface. What I mean is that with the old component system pretty much everyone knew how to operate it - press “open”, put in a CD and then press “play” - and the music played!
So I guess it’s more about the learning curve than anything else. And I don’t think the Roon mobile app has all that steep of a learning curve. And once one learns how to use Roon it is easier to use than a component hifi system. After all there is no disc to take out or put away, no source to select (CD, FM, tape, turntable, etc) - just search, select and press “play”!
When the house lights are coupled to a home automation system, then I’m afraid we rapidly get into uncharted waters. My better half has mastered controlling Roon to one zone from his smartphone, but that’s as far as he’s prepared to go.
There’s one physical switch (actually a Z-Wave node) that he knows will turn the living-room lights on and off, but that’s it. The rest of Roon and the home automation system is a complete mystery to him. God help him if I fall under a bus tomorrow.
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Part of this could be solved with a guest user profile that would allow for read-only access to Roon. Security! Then the guest could play around without fear that the library will be damaged. Decreases the risk. And it could potentially be a totally simplified interface for guests (no access to the Tags screen or settings, for example).
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@ Ralph_Pantuso
I don’t disagree with you. In a decent, well-installed digital music system, there may well be easy-to-use paths to reliable control (at least for the most important use cases). So yes, the main problem may be that there is enough variation among the UIs to make the path hard for a casual user to discover (that is, just by picking up an iOS device that I leave on the coffee table).
Sometimes I think my system is almost there. If I hand someone my Peachtree audio remote control, it is plain to see the power button, play/pause, volume, mute. In a room adjacent to the kitchen, they can get news or classical radio just by hitting the preset buttons atop a Bluesound FLEX speaker. Pressing preset #1 gets whatever is queued up (“now playing”) in Roon. Controlling that queue is where there is a bit of learning curve for a casual user. I’d like to be able to map those presets to a Roon classical playlist, a Roon indie pop playlist, etc. Currently, I don’t think that is possible … unless I recreate playlists within the Bluesound app. So then I’m managing playlists on 2 different systems.
Now we are getting into the ease of use versus lots of features and flexibility conundrum - the less features and flexibility the easier to use. For example many CD players have a playlist feature, meaning a custom playlist can be made for a specific CD where the tracks can be played or skipped in a user defined order - so how many people ever used this feature? And would a guest know how to use this feature on an unfamiliar CD player (or for that matter even their own CD player)? And a playlist spanning multiple CDs was not even possible.
I understand that my viewpoint is influenced by the fact that I’ve been streaming music as my primary listening source for over 12 years so I’m very used to this method. Add to that the fact that Roon is easier to use and maintain than Logitech Media Server - kind of a “behind the scenes” ease of use - and one understand my enthusiasm for streaming via Roon.
I wonder if that has ever been a Feature Request.
I think that was one of the first feature requests I made, at the time I just wanted a quick and dirty “Party Mode” because at that first party I used Roon, I was worried sick that a drunk guest would delete something ( there were not the multiple reminders back then,
).
Eventually that morphed into a more complete Profile split which included security and segregating libraries by profile.
At least separately - i.e. people have asked for configurable Overview or Home pages, and also for more separated profile access with configurable privileges. Those together make up what we’re talking about.
So, I also have 4 sonos endpoints in bedrooms and the kitchen. When folks stay, usually the same folks, they have the app on phones/ipads and use of the system through an account. I have playlists for them that I have compiled based on their own musical tastes.
Cant remember the last time I had a problem.
None, thats the point, but I wonder why others do!
I think I said that in my first statement.
Maybe I simply fail to see the correlation between your network, your devices, your (streaming) services, your library, your OS, and your system setup vs anyone else’s.
It wasn’t that i was comparing my system, it was the fact that i had no problems compared with myriad of problems experienced by others.
I think you simply have a problem with comprehension.
Maybe keep things simpler eh?
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I stand by my previous reply. You asked. I answered.
I have simplified down to a BlueSound Node 2 playing through its own DAC into powered Dynaudio Focus 110A. That replaced a multi-box system with Sonore microRendu with separate power supply, and a Audio Alchemy DAC/Pre-amp with its own power supply. I have about 700 cds ripped onto a laptop a couple of rooms away and a Tidal subscription, and I use ethernet-over-power to get Roon to the Node 2. Remote control is on an iPad. I am pretty sure SQ is more limited by me sitting off-axis and the speakers sitting on foam pads on the bookshelf instead of out in the room on stands than by my choice of DAC or streamer. But it sounds very good!
I mostly use Roon, but the kids can play Spotify when they are here, and my wife doesn’t really care. It’s a simple clean system and I should probably take my Thorens TD160 and phono pre-amp out of it and clean it up even more, since I hardly ever play a record.