Why is the Elac Discovery the only product to have Roon Essentials, I thought there would be a flood of products coming out with Roon pre installed. I do not understand, what is the issue that is stopping this from happening? Surely this is great introduction or an easy set up for someone getting into Roon.
Roon Essentials is a cut down version of Roon. The advantage is that there is no annual subscription, the disadvantage is that it’s limited in comparison with what Roon offers, and does not seem to be getting the newer features of Roon that have appeared over the past few years.
That said, there are plenty of manufacturers offering hardware that can run the Roon Core server (see the Roon Core Servers section here), while other manufacturers offer hardware that support operation as Roon endpoints.
Yes I do understand all that but the Roon subscription lifetime is over $700 for us in Australia. I just think you are missing a big opportunity by not including everything in one box.By the way with the next major release of Kodi it is getting a major overhaul in the music library department which may be just as good or even surpass Roon.
“you are missing” - I’m just a user of Roon, I don’t work for them…
Unless you need the DSP options and DSD playback, the ELAC Discovery is a great and affordable piece of kit.
Although you can never upgrade Roon Essentials to Roon, your can use the audio outputs of the Discovery as Roon endpoints for Roon.
A note on this:
Even with the Leia release doing something for music metadata I believe kodi will still be a different kind of animal. Just some points:
- kodi is built for a different user experience (remote controlled on big screens; for local control something like yatse is needed if one wants a nice experience or so it was the last time I checked kodi’s own remote app);
- kodi music metadata sourcing works differently and the sources usable out of the box are probably not as vast as Roon’s currently are – no matter how good Roon’s metadata really is;
- kodi allows for a lot of configuration regarding its library presentation and you might have to tinker a lot if you want to get the most from it, the limit being its data model – Roon wants to deliver “turn-key” so not much tinkering with the library sources is needed nor is it allowed;
- kodi is not dedicated to music and doesn’t focus on robust and preferably integrated audio delivery to (hifi) endpoints – which doesn’t mean the way kodi does it isn’t viable, but it’s (mightily) different.
If kodi could be “the better animal” for your use case is something you’d have to find out by experiment though, I guess. 
I think this looks pretty good.
Every artist has their own logo on top right, the album cover with the disc spinning and and the actual disc label downloads, artist and album info scrolls on bottom of screen, artist fan art will change every 30 secs or so, bit rate is shown etc.
As far as audio quality it delivers bit perfect audio to my Project S2 Dac and any other DAC.
That would only be true if you stick with the artists present at theaudiodb and/or other fanart sites kodi scrapes. 
What I mean (since I’m not really using kodi this shows only Estuary being the Leia default skin):
If nobody took the time to provide fanart this
changes into this:
and that’s rather boring.
Fanart or not - if you want a full blown Big Screen Experience™ kodi with a nice skin is a good bet.
Still, I think due to its approach to the media experience, kodi is no actual “competitor” for Roon. And - that’s why the quotation marks - kodi, run by volunteers, is most likely not interested to compete anyway. 
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You have shown Estuary which is the most boring and basic skin.
I know. I said so. But if no fanart is found no skin will shine.
You can change scrapers to pick up fan art or add your own change like you do in Roon, speaking of Roon I had to download and add about 30 percent of my own artwork.
This is pretty cool, even had a vinyl spinning.
Essentials 1.7 update brought a lot of changes.