I love this post - reminds me of Jerry Pournelle classic Chaos Manor columns in Byte.
Love this. I use Roon all the time in my household it’s transformed how I listen.
Wonder if you have tried MP3TAG when searching for album covers?.
When i rip my cd’s i always use this program.
“Up vote” for MP3Tag - super useful and easy to use program.
Why haven’t I seen this post before now! Great, well-thought out presentation of one man’s audio quest. I especially loved the colorful graphic representation of your home digital media eco-system. What software did you use to bring that to life? Many thanks, even if I’m late to the party.
Richard D
Thanks Richard.
I use Publisher and convert files to jpg. It is a skill I taught myself years ago when responsible for preparing monthly Newsletters for as tourism body. Those were the days I made few typos!!!
Amazing thank you for this.
I love it! What a beautiful post and inspiring that at 87, you’ve obviously not lost much. ; )
Thanks for this wonderful post, I very much enjoyed it. Now there’s a reason for me to look forward to retirement.
Yes, you can spend a lot of time with music and with ROON. In fact, you can spend time listening to music via ROON while tinkering with ROON.
When I started to first transfer my considerable CD collection (mostly classical music, film music, some jazz, electronic, and others, etc. ) back in 2013, I quickly noticed that classical music tagging is so inconsistent, I had to decide on one path. I wanted only one name for “Rachmaninoff”, only one name for “Dvořák”, not five different ones (like “Antonín Dvořák”, “Antonin Dvorak”, “Dvorak Antonin”, “Dvorak, Antonin (1841-1904)”, and so on). I wanted classical albums grouped by composer, not performer. And yes, often those classic earlier artworks of classical music albums were much more striking and original than those later ones (on box sets), which often just have a conductor or composer snapshot, that’s it.
And I can see how it can also be fun to spend that much time tinkering around with ROON. You certainly get way more mileage out of ROON with your setup than I do with mine (basically just one ROOM with a listening device and maybe my phone with headphones), but who knows what will come down the road.
I am currently trying out ROON ARC, which gives me the ability to have my own music on the go.
Wow, now 90, but time to report a few changes.
Accepting that I’m not immortal, I surveyed all the expensive A/V toys I had and realised they posed a difficult task for my two executive children as they would be difficult to sell in this lovey, but isoilated island State of Tasmania. A real estate agent made it clear that none of it would add value to the home so would be cleared out before the house was offered for sale (none of my children want the home).
My hearing is not great (surprise, msurprise) so those superb Majestic electrostatic speakers were not being fully appreciated anyway. None of my 4 children (an ironic desctription when one is retired lready!) appreciate high end gear although I have set up my eldest with a Roon system - he is the only one who has shown the slightest interest in classical music - but is a bit of a techological luddite.
So that glorious A/V home theatre system, posted up so proudly 3 years ago, has been dismantled and the items are now in Melbourne up for sale. I have set up a lesser system in another smaller room based on the latest Sony 65" TV and a Sony reciever. And with appropriate cone speakers it is reproducing surround sound rather nicely on music BDs and TV.
But of course I had to have Roon available there. Feeding a balanced digital cable from the Aries G1 was impractical so I looked around at what streamers could be used. Cambridge gear became a focus and so I purchased a used Azur which had been highly praised..
Then came the irony, an old codger at 90, well past his use by date, trying to listed to quality music via Focal Utopia headphones, did not like the sound he heard from the Axur via a nice Audio-gd preamp. That really questions how someone with obvious hearing defects can have the audacity to be critical of audio quality.!! Any scepticism about that is unsurprising but that was how I felt.
But there was a nice answer. In the last year I had come to respect Topping products and, in particular their DX9. So the answer to the conundrum was to feed balanced digital out of the Azur into the Topping. Hey presto, lovely sounding (to these tired old ears) music.
So this ancient worn out audiophile is now happy in his new man den. He has as much idiot TV, serious music video and, best of all, quality headphone music via Roon.
Thank you everyone for your nice comments. Obviously Roon attacts the best of people!
John