Hi everyone! I am new to these forums and am hoping to get some advice/suggestions.
Roon is such a well-loved and well-reviewed product that my dissatisfaction with it must be due to something I’ve overlooked.
I’ve bought a microrendu because I really love the sound quality. I stream all my music from tidal. I was using a Mac mini that I integrated into my home theater setup as a tidal server but found that it can’t compete with the quality of the microrendu and I was also tired of having to use a keyboard and mouse to switch songs.
Enter Roon, it was supposed to allow me to stream tidal from my phone to my microrendu seamlessly.
My experience has been really subpar.
Isssues:
1.My core is on an IMac in my home office that I don’t use that much. It is in sleep mode 90% of the time. Am I really supposed to turn the computer on whenever I want to stream music? This seems silly. My computer can continue downloads and other processes while in sleep mode, why not connect to Roon?
Tidal has multiple versions of the same album, deluxe/explicit/Master, yet I cannot see that Roon distinguishes one from the other. Frankly, it’s much easier to use the tidal app than to use Roon to stream tidal.
Everyone raves about Roon, tell me, what am I missing?? Should I be using something else? I just want to sit on my couch and stream music to my sonore via my phone.
Yes, the Core must be on and not sleeping in order to listen to music with Roon. You can read more about the Roon Architecture here. When you are using your phone to control play by Roon through your microRendu, you are not streaming from your phone. With Roon you are always streaming through the Core and a phone or other Control device is used to control and configure your Core. There are, other apps that the microRendu supports that I understand can play a stream from your phone otherwise than through Roon, allowing you to turn off or sleep your iMac, but I am not familiar with them so won’t try to advise about them.
In my opinion different Tidal versions are not well supported in Roon at the moment. If you import a Tidal album into your Library (in effect favouriting it in Tidal) then you can edit the Version field in Roon to say what you want (Deluxe, 2014 Remaster etc.). You can also ask Roon to display an E for Explicit in General/Settings. At the moment Roon doesn’t know if a Tidal album is MQA (Master) until it starts playing it. I expect to see some improvement in this regard when Roon releases its MQA solution (no timeframe announced, but I believe it has a high priority atm).
For me the things that make Roon great include the integration with my local library and Tidal, the music discovery from linked albums, artists, influences etc. and the DSP and integration with HQP.
If you find that Roon isn’t a good fit for you then it may be that one of the other bundled apps with the microRendu serves your purposes better.
In any event, if you have further queries comments etc. please don’t hesitate to post. The community is here to help each other.