A short example: Do you hear your mecanical watch all time ? If you pay attention, you will hear tic tic tic unless your brain ignore it.
For sure, when you listening music, you NEVER hear it the same manner. You listening certain aspects and specially when you comparing 2 things you can tell … wow … this drum snap with the reverb … wow. I never heard that. When you comeback to your other source and you pay attention, all that is there but before you never notice that this way.
You listening music through magnifing glass.
Today, you hear something and tomorrow you hear something else.
I compared roon, hqplayer, audirvana 3.5, j-river and linn kazoo. I was shocked roon have the worst sound and my bests was linn kazoo and hqplayer without filters, audirvana and j-river just before roon.
Roon was not sharp, lack details compared to hqplayer (no filter) or linn kazoo. I had impression to have less dynamic, round sound with roon.
I have compared that through my streamer exasound.
With roon with raat and other software through dlna.
I have done last week another test to know the impact of the streamer compared to my old setup.
Running my laptop directly on my dac with usb. J-river was running + fidelizer pro to uptimize the laptop and stop useless services …
I compared that to roon through my streamer and found Roon+streamer much better. More laidback, more musical, bigger soundstage with more layers.
J-river/fidelizer was sharper and put more my attention to details. Like listening music with all lights on … I much prefer have diffuse light to have more ambiance.
It’s almost opposite impression to my first test.
While I need player to play tidal with convolution engaged, Roon is the only software doing that. Unless j-river is FAR FAR BETTER to roon in every way for me to play my local music.
I HATE the way roon remore show my albums (by page). I much prefer infinite swap with album picture displayed smooth on my ipad. But … it’s not support tidal …
I have to compare roon directly on my laptop and compare it to j-river. After will compared roon on laptop to roon + streamer. It’s pretty time consuming and I am not sure I will do that shortly.
My test j-river on laptop to roon + streamer convince me I prefer roon + streamer … I have my solution. Can I have better ?
I can suggest you to download hqplayer and do not put any filter on in hqplayer. You can play with hqplayer or without without leave your chair. HQPlayer work for 30 min, after it close and you have to open it again and continue testing. HQplayer is $$ and I don’t find that solution as stable as roon alone.
Try fidelizer pro running on your computer while roon play. With J-river the difference seems obvious to me. Better timings, more details.