I tried out Euphony today. It’s priced slightly lower than Roon but not much in it. It offers big promises but in my opinion comes up very short on all of them. It comes in at about 10.5 US Dollars a month compared to Roon at 12.99 for a yearly sub. It offers Tidal, Qobuz and some other stuff but now much over Roon. I just added Qobuz and my own files.
Well its own music software is terrible and so basic it makes Audirvana look next gen. It’s slow, looks horrible no info on the music at all and the accompanying phone-app is just as bad and not very responsive.
Their own software supports playing to other Euphony endpoints (you have to pay for these so price goes up past Roon adding just one more) or UPnP (if it works). UPnP implementation seems to be very flakey would not respond to commands such as pause all the time and no artwork shown at all on my Naim.
It does offer DSP so I could load in my convolution filters I use in Roon to directly compare sq. Does Euphony sound any better than Roon on ROCk. It’s the amazing sq that we are supposed to be paying for after all. Well not in my subjective tests it didn’t for Qobuz or local files sounded the same. Did putting the playback queue into Ram make any difference. Not that I could tell. Did choosing Ramroot which loads the whole os to Ram make any difference. No except it takes forever to boot in this mode. For the record It’s running on the exact same pc as Roon same music sources from local USB drive and to same endpoint my Naim Uniti Atom, only difference is it’s just booting from a usb stick for the trial so I didn’t have to loose my Rock install. Not that I believe this would change anything, perhaps speed up some performance things on the Ui?
Euphony does allow you install Roon server as well or Roon bridge if you wish but why would anyone sub to this and sub to Roon on top of it it makes zero sense to be paying so much for what is just an OS. The supposed sq benefits are just not there in my experience and offers the same quality as using Roon on ROCK.
Whilst Roon isn’t perfect compared to Euphony it’s way better value for money if you ask me . It’s far slicker and easier to use, offers far more in the way you can manage your library, sounds the same at least over the network it does, supports way more devices to play to, presents your content in just a far better way, it’s apps although not perfect are leagues ahead, it has DSP way better multiroom and doesn’t charge you extra for upsampling or Roon bridges.
Think Roon is expensive?Thing again when you look at something like Euphony.