(Almost) 6 months later.
- Roon Essentials now supports 30.000 tracks now instead of 15.000.
- Roon Essentials supports the same Roon Ready Endpoints as the paid version of Roon.
- Roon Essentials does not support Squeezeboxes.
- Roon Essentials does not support DSD files.
- No signal path is shown in Roon Essentials, but the sound quality remais exactly the same.
Conclusions:
If your music library consists of 30.000 tracks or less and you don’t need DSD and you don’t want to connect an old Squeezebox, Roon Essentials offers the same functionality and user experience as Roon.
For 1099 euro you can buy a beautifully sounding Elac music player (with analog/digital outputs and USB), that has a very responsive lifetime licensed Roon server built in.
Or, you could buy a Roon license for 500 euro, and let’s say an SMS200 for 450 euro, and a reasonable quality USB DAC for about 500 euro, and a NUC with SSD to run the Roon server on for about 300 euro.
In that case you spend at least 1750 euro for the same sound quality and het same software experience.
The choice is yours.