Disagree completely. For me, streaming services are not the reason I invested in Roon, as I did not have Tidal for the first year and half of my Roon use. I left JRiver, Foobar, etc because they were not “good enough”.
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Unfortunately if you provide a Bridge even if it happens to be a Roon Bridge, a Troll will appear from under it 
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At that bargain basement budget level, I was thinking regular lossy Tidal, not Hi Fi.
And I rounded.
You mean MQA Tidal?
As I described in my anecdote, discovery is very useful within my own library.
When I originally started this thread, my intent was to explore the question of the value of Roon, and to provide a way to calibrate that against other investments we make. It was not to discuss whether Roon had value at all.
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No. Minimal Tidal, for a minimal budget, in that thought experiment.
“Please decide !
If Roon is for discovery, it should integrated with some streaming provider (you cannot have the whole discography of the Universe on your local machine). It’s integrated with TIDAL ? are you happy with TIDAL ?
Discovery is not so important for you ? Do yo need only the management of your local files ? then JRiver is good enough.”
I disagree wholeheartedly, even when I was buying CD’s back in the 90’s and 2000’s, I had too much music to digest. Now, some 15 years later, I have around 10000 albums, and at least 95-97% of the time I don’t need to look further afield than my locally stored music to go on a satisfying journey musically, and still am overwhelmed by connections to which I was completely oblivious previously, thanks entirely to Roon. Recently I had run out of money and couldn’t pay my Tidal subs for a month. I didn’t suffer.
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I finally bought the Roon lifetime membership.
I have around 4500 albums in my library and i’m not planning to use/buy Tidal in the short term (at least not in the next 2 years). I got the feeling that Roon is the perfect ‘‘match’’ for our music libraries in order to listen, rediscover and get fully immersed in its graphical interface.
I hope to be right and don’t get bored too soon… 
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If you even consider getting bored, that is the time to get Tidal. All the music in the world to integrate lol
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Stereophiles Top 6 Room correction EQ’s
- Audyssey Sound Equalizer, $2500
- Meridian 861 with MRC room correction, $18,995
- Rives Audio sub-PARC and PARC, $5000 / $3200
- SVSound AS-EQ1, $799
- Velodyne SMS-1, $749
- Z-Systems RDP-1 Reference, $4000
Included with Roon for $500, plus all the other reasons that everyone else loves it.
I find these arguments interesting partly because it is all relative, but also because it cuts across many of the more expensive hobbies. To me a $500 lifetime subscription is a great deal. I’ve got a lot invested in my audio equipment and $500 is on the low end of anything I own. Yet this, along with TIDAL, gives me access to a huge library of music, and without music, the rest of my setup would just be collecting dust. I don’t know how Roon does it. To keep a paid staff that works on updates and improvements and I’ve paid only $500 for life. I think it could be hard to keep the staff happy and the lights on.
Another expensive hobby is photography. Photographers complain all the time over the cost of the software they use to manage and edit their photos. But the software is a fraction of the cost of the camera and lens they own. If you don’t have a way to sort through, fine tune, and store those photos you have a lot of expensive equipment that does you little good.
One last example is bicycling. A quality new racing bicycle can cost easily $6,000 USD and that is the low end. Then there is the uniform, sunglasses, helmet and other gear that makes you look like a racer. Yet when it comes to training software for your smart trainer, everyone feels cheated if they pay more than $10 a month to keep access to the training package.
People into all these hobbies have money as all these hobbies are not cheap. But why is it that when it comes to software, everyone feels it is overpriced? It may be the nature of blogs and who tends to post on them and why. It could be most people feel Roon is priced right but more people who feel it cost too much tend to post.
Look at it this way, with a little luck, I’ll be using Roon for another 20 years. That works out to $2 a month. With TIDAL I save money not having to buy all the CDs I used to buy. Finding out about Roon was the greatest audio thing to happen to me since I bought my first turntable while in college. Roon is an amazingly great deal.
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Absolutely!
Compared to all the other gear, and Tidal/Qobuz subscriptions, and buying downloads and CDs, Roon is the least expensive part of my music experience (excluding cables because I don’t go there).
And yet, people complain about software. Difficult to understand where this comes from. Especially as the value of modern gear, like PSAudio and Chord, derives very much from the embedded software.
I don’t even want to talk about the cost side of it, about the people who build the software. Cost does not imply value. Here, the discussion is about the value.
(This lack of respect for the value of software is incomprehensible and annoying to me because, full disclosure, I have made a 45 year career in software.)
I have written about one perspective of this question of value:
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Of all the things Roon is justifiably accused of, being expensive isn’t one of them.
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Value is subjective…in this response I am not going to argue over the relative value or price of Roon vis a vis other software.
But talking about software and hardware costs is not an apples to apples comparison:
—Software is not transferable. You can sell an amp, speaker cables, what have you, if you decide to move on. Even true with CDs. Not software.
—Hardware works whether or not the manufacturer is still in business. Roon depends on Roon staying in existence.
—Much of the cost of hardware is transportation/distribution, both of components and the finished product. This is cost that software manufacturer’s don’t have, at least not to any similar extent.
I don’t mean to argue about software values here, but I do not buy the “Roon costs less than my power conditioner [EDIT:] so therefore it is a huge bargain” argument.
I think it is closer to apples-apples than it seems.
First, the centerpiece of the value is what it does, not how it is built.
But second:
True. But is this an important part of your value analysis? Not mine, because I am an optimist, don’t think about abandonment. But in addition, hardware becomes obsolete pretty quickly. (I recently switched to Fuji mirrorless, and my investment in Canon DSLR cameras and lenses is pretty much dead, I have a resale quote of about 10%.)
Since modern products delivered in hardware form contains software, in fact much (most) of its value is software, they age out quickly. Security patches. Support for new features we all expect. And repair/service: I have a lot of money sunk in Meridian gear, it has not been reliable, and their financial situation is not promising, I worry a lot. And if Elon Musk fails, how will a Tesla retain its value?
I don’t think cost is a factor in value, I have many high-cost products that are worthless. But if you want to look at cost, it isn’t that cost is less, it is that the marginal cost is zero which invalidates classical economic theory. We used to say that the first Windows 7 disc cost $7 billion and the others cost zero; how do you draw supply and demand curves for that? (I heard a story from when Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were grilled by the Senate anti-trust in the 90s. One senator, one or two generations older than Bill and Steve, said “you’re a monopolist and monopolists raise prices and hurt consumers.” “No, we’ll lower prices.” “We have all studied economics, we know monopolists raise prices.” “No, look at the cost curve, that’s central to the software business, we lower prices and make more money.” They were never able to understand each other, because economic fundamentals are turned upside down. And as more and more products derive a lot of value from their software component, this shift affects everything.)
True, but your perspective is wrong from my point of view. I measure the value of software by functionality: i.e. does it do what it is supposed to do and does it do it well?
Roon is still lacking in many areas. It’s not about price, it’s about promising something and then failing to deliver what is promised.
Is Roon the only software vendor guilty of this kind of behaviour? No. Many vendors are guilty of this, many of them sell business-critical software like accounting and ERP software.
For some thirty-odd years I have had to develop auxilliary tools to fill in the missing functionalities, correct outcomes, fine tune reports and so on. I have grown weary over time but I realise I will have to continue doing this until I retire. So I pay a lot of money each year for business software that only delivers part of what it should deliver and believe me: I complain to these vendors much more forcefully than I complain about Roon.
I just don’t like having this experience with something I use for fun.
We agree, the value of Roon lies in what it does, not cost or anything else.
And that’s subjective.
That’s why I wrote that discussion of displacement theory, to help reason about that.
But this applies to all products.
Don’t get me started on the user interface of BMW infotainment systems…
Try selling film cameras !!
I swapped my entire, extensive, kit for one lens !!
Not abandonment, upgrade. If hardware X no longer fills your needs, sell it or trade it in and have part of your budget for the upgrade already.
My Levinson 26 preamp was built in the 80s and isn’t anywhere near obsolete. Matter of fact I could sell it for a multiple of what I paid for it. Same goes for my ML 23, Krell amp, Magnepan and B&W speakers, etc. Buying hardware that is essentially a computer is a different thing entirely, but even so, those are still usually transferable.
So Roon shares risks with Meridian’s software based approach or a Tesla. Is this a strong argument?
My point is that transportation and distribution costs for hardware are typically much, much more than for downloadable software, thus not supporting a model where software and hardware prices can be directly compared apples to apples.
Excellent attempt at circumlocution…but still ain’t buying the comparison. I am not indicting those who have decided to license Roon. I obviously have myself. It just isn’t a compelling argument that Roon is some sort of bargain because it’s cheaper than something that has entirely different value dynamics. That is like saying gas is a bargain because it’s cheaper than the car.
EDIT: lest my post be viewed as critical of Anders’ post (versus disagreeing with the logic), that is definitely not my intent. This forum wouldn’t be half as much fun if Anders didn’t post regularly. All well considered, all entertaining, some downright clever. I just don’t happen to agree with this one here.