As long as only “your Internet” is the deciding factor here, that’s fine. However, I strongly suspect that’s not the biggest potential outage here. IF Roon is homed in AWS or any of the big cloud providers they actually have a recent history of large scale outages taking down massive swathes of services that are homed there. Google “AWS Outage December 2021” if you doubt it. The issue is NOT just “your last mile of Internet” it is the fact that Roon now requires an IP connection to a live centralised service end to end to play your local files. I’m shocked that any Audiophile would be ok with this when so many argue about spending thousands of dollars to obtain tiny increments of additional determinism in jitter or some other marginal gain. This is actually a very big paradigm change and you don’t have to be “old” to be concerned.
I trialed Audirvana. The fact that the application ended up hanging for several minutes when I pointed it to my music library located on a mapped drive on my server was enough for me to give up. After “not responding” for several minutes it did come back, but the interface was junk and the way it treated local media vs Qobuz was not nearly as intuitive as Roon, it also isn’t nearly as stable as Roon. Essentially you get what you pay for.
I tried Audirvana extensively a while ago and for me the comparison and decision tree was pretty simple.
Roon’s meta data/art, the way it unifies local and streaming libraries, and the way it handles multiroom setups (including being able to do dsp room correction) are far superior.
From a sound perspective I don’t think either is superior, to me audirvana was brighter and a bit more clinical, and roon was a bit warmer so shades of grey with neither better. But all personal perspectives.
If all you care about is sound in a simple non multi zone setup, then pick the one that sounds better. Audirvana can be a great choice if you like its sound better. If in addition you care about the other things noted above then roon is far superior in then roon is really the only choice.
For my setup with 12 zones (with room correction in 2), using a combo of an extensive local library and streaming services, and a preference for roon’s warmer sound, there was only one choice. Audirvana wasn’t close to meeting my needs.
I’ve been listening to Audirvana Studio for several hours tonight. It does sound good. Of course, Eva Cassidy would sound good using tin cans connected by a string or AM radio.
Personally, I believe It does not matter: It is “ME” who is listening on “MY” system, so why would I bother thinking if such music would sound better in my neighbor’s system?
for as long as my system makes me happy, then I should be good.
Oh, I’m ‘sure’ there are others that will sound better than mine - LOUD OR NOT - but I am not bothered by it; else, I’d feel miserable, take out my wallet, and probably splurge into something I actually do not need.
Mine makes me happy - loud or not.
Indeed! 
In terms of SQ - I could not determine any major difference, but Roon do sound warmer and tamer than Audirvana Studio which is more upfront (not in a bad way), difference being minute to even be noticeable in serious listening.
Both Apps are running in my late 2012 MacMini on macOS Catalina either via USB into an SMSL DAC with native DSD support or via my Wadia A321 DAC (they’ve been calling it Decoding Computer). No life-changing difference to me.
What I miss from Roon are 2 things:
- Highreaudio.com: Qobus & Tidal are not available in the Philippines (whew!)
- iTunes/Apple Music
I do feel that Roon’s UI is much easier to navigate and ‘makes sense’.
and its new ARC is making me gravitate to it… I just need to convince myself that the ‘cost of commitment’ is really within my plans.
it is impossible for two different “bit perfect” streaming applications to sound different. This is purely in the camp of “bits are bits” at that level, because you’re not dealing with a PCM or bitstream data, but just literal bits of information at a computational level.
Any difference between playback software, is purely imagined
unless of course there’s DSP or some other signal modification going on, right?
(I know Roon can accomplish this, but no idea about audirvana)
It has DSP like Roon, it also has a number of things it does to try and control the audio chain and reduce system resources to reduce potential noise, much like Fidelizer software for windows is claimed to do. It tries to optimise the system it’s being run on, which Roon doesn’t do a thing in this regard. Those that claim it sounds different are using it with a DAC attached to the PC not over the network, even Roon do say for SQ reasons it’s best not to connect DAC to core.
I noticed a difference using Audirvāna and Roon on the same pc to the same DAC. I didn’t like Audirvāna at all it sounded more processed to my ears, this was just running remote as a bridge for Roon not as a core as well. This was to a lowly Dragonfly Red at the time a better DAC may have given different results. Or I imagined it, don’t care either way as I didn’t like it sq or use wise.
Yes but then its not a bit perfect signal is it… if the software us relaying information from the original file to the streamer / DAC, without DSP. There will be, and cannot be any difference. No matter how “directly” the software chooses to control the output device.
oh, totally. I’m just saying that might explain why people hear a difference or have a preference of one over the other 
Sure, but that’s just FUD hokum, right?
No idea it does sound different that’s all I can say.
different approach.
It’s bit perfect and passes bit perfect tests on dacs that can perform them. If some secret dsp sauce was used it would not pass them. So what ever it does or doesn’t do it’s not affecting the digital side of the connected DAC. Which comes back to it being potential pc noise taking a route to the analogue circuits of the connected DAC.
Or something else entirely, as it’s very unlikely that two different pieces of software are actually going to produce noise differences that are audibly perceptible at the other end of the audio chain.
If you think different software sounds different, please re-read this. Then examine your test process and have a think. You cannot hear differences that aren’t there.
If I ordered a CD, it would probably sound the same whether it was delivered by UPS or FedEx. Silly, I know.
^ ha! Good analogy, lol.
I initially though there was an audible difference between Roon & Audirvana, but several blind listening tests laster, I came to realise it was all in my head.