I Have Used Roon for the better part of a year. Here are my thoughts

Hi Y’all, hope you’re all doing well.

Well It has been about a year all told since I made the big switch from Apple Music to Roon. Since then, while I’ve made attempts to go back, I’ve stuck with roon in one form or another for a years worth. So, here’s all what I like, don’t like, and what I think can be improved.

  • Pros
    • ARC
      • One of the main reasons I’ve used roon. When I first started my roon journey, I was running on an old burner iMac that could only run roon 1.8. Since then, I’ve only ran roon on 2.0, and I love it! Mainly for two reasons: those computers generally had faster processing (duh) for MUSE and such (Upsampling, EQ, etc.) For me the big thing: ROON ARC. While I have issues with the app that I’ll discuss later, It’s probably a big reason I still use roon today.
    • Metadata & Organization.
      • I love the amount of data and info I can get for albums, artists and more. From the Wikipedia linkage, to the TiVo Artist & Album Reviews, they give lots of great info at your fingertips. One thing I wish for that’s a bit of a longshot would be providing album info from places like apple music and other services, mos of which would be a long shot (like apple music, which would probably only happen if apple was integrated in the first place) No matter what, It’s great nonetheless.
    • MUSE
      • One of the main reasons I’ve stuck with Roon is that nothing beats the DSP functionality of roon. Yes, Audirvana does exist, but doesn’t have the mobile app or device support that Roon has.
  • Cons
    • Arc Stability
      • I feel like since I started using roon arc. the app has become buggier and buggier. New features in the app have been nice, but it doesn’t emulate the at-home roon experience enough for my liking. and that’s one of the thing’s I’d like to see more. I’d also like to see a desktop roon ARC app for when I don’t have my phone and my laptop is away from my server (for context, I am a 17 year old high school student with divorced parents, so half the time I rely on ARC for music from my phone)
    • Control4 Integration
      • At my dad’s house, where my server is setup, we have an amazing Hi-Fi system and Home theater, that I’ve called the “Hi-Fi Theater”. For the theater space, and the floor itself, we rely on control4 for automation and control of our tech down in the basement. The issue is the integration for roon is so meh that I just end up defaulting to the roon app anyways, and again, while the UI for roons Control4 Driver is limited (just the way Control4 is), I’d still like to see something similar to the regular roon app on mobile or Computers. Also, I’d like to have a way to select zones and servers within the Control4 UI, since having to call my Control4 techs just to change one setting in my project is pretty damn annoying and frustrating. Not just for me as a user, but I know it’s also probably frustrating for my Project Managers.
  • What I’d like to see
    • Better ARC app (discuessed earlier)
    • Better Control4 Integration
    • Surround Support with services like Tidal (and possibly apple music if ever integrated, doubt it tho :slight_smile:)
    • Some sort of student discount (doubt that would be possible, but now with roon being owned by Harman, they might have the backing to do different discounted tiers or similar.)
    • MORE STABLE CARPLAY
    • Less battery usage on ARC

Anyways, that’s all I have, thank you so much for reading, and take care.

Apple Intelligence Summary for the TLDR: The author has been using Roon for a year and highlights its strengths, including ARC, metadata, and DSP functionality. However, they express concerns about ARC’s stability and Control4 integration, and suggest improvements such as a desktop ARC app, surround support, and a student discount.

4 Likes

Pensioners discount would be more expensive considering the demographics …

1 Like

Could you elaborate please? (hard for me to understand fully, sorry)