There is a very slight difference - if you listen to a Tidal track through Roon and then listen to the very same Tidal track through something like say Kazoo. The Kazoo version sounds better…( make sure all processing is turned off in Roon) The Roon version is slightly edgy and digital sounding…I’ve no idea if this is since just 1.5 or existed before?
Yes, same for me, of course personal choice matters, and our brain is also very good at getting our ears used to a sound that we then take as “reference” - hence we all have a relative calibration issue, perhaps the flip side of our “tastes” - different people hear different things, in a way. Natural noises recordings and real life listening or practice of acoustic instruments are a good tool to help recalibrate.
I would look at it statistically. Is not it likely that, with a large variety of always imperfect but diverse settings, people would either find no difference or a positive difference, and a very few ones would find a negative one, the difference of appreciation would come from a fine tuning of the previous version ?
The additional point that the number of answers to this feed is only one small fraction of the total number of users might give more weight to it, even though the fraction of critical listeners like us in the thread is certainly much larger.
One month later, I still feel hard to complain about anything in the software performance - in a MacOS setting. I find also more daily (day/night) fluctuations coming from electrical power environment, despite a big mains filter fed by specific wiring to the electrical panel of the apartment, than the differences between 1.4 and 1.5, from what my (fairly trained) musical memory remembers.