Stephen, you may loose internet now and then but don’t notice because you don’t rely on critical internet services. Certainly in place like Florida we have these things called storms that can bring the internet down for minutes, hours or even days. That said this thread is about this person’s buying decision. If all he does is stream online services then there is little incentive for him to spend the money on Roon. He can just use the streaming service app. On the other hand if he has a ripped collection as he says, then Roon adds a great deal of value and is the better home collection streaming platform. For those of you who live in Internet nirvana that means version 2.0, for those of us who don’t that means 1.8. Depending on his personal situation and manner of intended use, if 1.8 is the better option, then he may want to wait and see what the future brings before investing.
Is that really a problem?
As always with these questions, it depends. Or, to misappropriate Ernest Rutherford, “The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don’t”. 
For me, it was one of the main selling points of Roon that I can have a complete view of my library for productive artists of which I have (or are available) some releases on vinyl, some on CD, some as downloads, some in Qobuz, some in Tidal. (Those that only have a vinyl release are dragged into Roon by creating a fake FLAC with the correct tags).
This way I can choose to see their whole output chronologically or use focus just on particular media. Wouldn’t want to be without this.
I know the thread is clearly Roon vs Audirvana, but I wonder why I don’t see threads comparing to jRiver’s offering? I won’t touch Audirvana. So I am curious. Is it not considered serious or . . . ?
If I’m way off topic, entirely possible, I will delete.
Thank you.
I’m not sure what I am seeing, but if Audirvana can do this too, good for them. I was writing on the assumption that it can’t as stated above. In any case just saying that I like the ability, whoever provides it.
No, I’m showing that Audirvana does Tidal and Qobuz, but local files are a different screen. I never noticed that before.
Ah, understood.
LMS will also do this “integrated library view” of local files and services. But only for Tidal, Qobuz, and Spotify as far as I know.
That’s what was meaning , Roon mixes streaming and local in the same view AS uses 2 views , its not much better really than using say the Hardware app , StreamMagic or Naim etc which has 2 views . They come free with hardware
As a lifer I’m locked in for the ride.
Until any competition software can offer the same features as Roon, and match or better Roon’s DSP engine (convolution filters for crossover) I’m not interested in looking elsewhere.
I stream pretty much everything I listen to these days. I have circa 500 albums of local content but everything else is Qobuz. My preferences in music have changed a lot over time, so streaming suits me.
To date, no software I have tried comes close to Roon’s features, user ability, GUI or reliability.
That is how most players present that have linked in services based on the API. Roon’s deep integration is responsible for the “unified view”.
Kind of it’s got no concept of versions last time I used it so it’s just a lot of duplicates shown if you have a local copy and add one or two different releases from streaming. You can’t group different versions together either. I group all different releases together so only ever see one album cover, make the one I prefer the primary and just manually choose from versions if I want to play a different version.
Correct. It’s certainly not Roon in this regard.
Unless DSP is applied, the two services are simply network audio transports, transmitting digital audio streams—which are preserved via TCP/IP error checking protocols. Thus, by definition the “sound quality” will be identical between the two services, because there is no sound at all until the signal is converted to analog format by your DAC.
As to whether one service has superior digital processing, that should be easy to measure, although it isn’t of much importance to me. I never use volume leveling and rarely upsample—and the GUI and user experience is so exponentially more sophisticated and ergonomic in Roon that any minor gradations in sound quality (which would be minor at best) aren’t worth the hassle. Audirvana is like computer coding before object based languages—way, way too complicated.
I do wish Roon had Highresaudio available however.
How do you mean?
Many users especially those striving for really high quality material are asking for highresaudio.com integration but obviously Tidal & MQA lobby is stronger 
Ah, the service! Got it
So if you are really interested in software running your music. Check this out.
No gain here for me. But I do like this channel. Also a roon rock sounds better to me on dedicated NUC then all the rest. Just to bad HQ player software is not integrated. Would buy it if its in pad version of roon rock just to try it.