I didn’t realize that my system could sound this good! Last night I gave it a really good whirl, and my first impression was that the soundstage was very wide, deep and detailed. But, I thought there was a lack of height in the soundstage… that is until I heard sounds that seemed to be pitched 10-12 feet in the air. I actually had to look up!
JRiver is gone, as is Pure Music. All I want to know now is whether or not I can convert my annual license to a lifetime license at some point within the first year.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a Roon “lifer”, but your perception that Roon sounds better may happen because of its easy configuration of exclusive mode than JRiver not being capable of delivering the goods. I run Roon through JRiver’s WDM driver and it uses all JRiver’s DSP benefits.
You are probably misconfigured in JRiver because it’s not very user friendly, but its audiophile capabilities are far more powerful at this stage. Jriver is the go-to for ripping and catalog management. Roon’s strong suit is meta-data, music discovery, and playback. I just want to avoid Roon making structural changes to my music’s file paths, so I let Jriver do all the folder watching and move/copy/rename into my folder structure.
JRiver has far more interesting Theater modes for playback but Roon can easily take that crown by adding support for more than just cover art (additional JPGs and PDF files included with some digital downloads) and then supplementing this with artist and album specific art and meta-data from various outside sources. That’s where I personally want to see Roon evolve.
I’ve been running JRiver on my Mac, and I’ve configured it so that it is as pure as possible. That means no DSP, upsampling or any other additional “benefits” from JRiver. This would make it a very fair comparison to Roon in its current state. Apples to apples, Roon blows JRiver away (as it does with Pure Music). I should also add that over the last six months I’ve transitioned from a Meridian G68 to an Oppo 105D. My system has never sounded better.
I haven’t decided on the sound of Roon compared to Pure Music, Audirvana Plus, Decibel, and JRiver. All of the above have their strength and weaknesses. JRiver can be more of a challenge to configure, IMHO, at least in my own experience. When optimally configured, it can sound fantastic. The sound of Roon is quite good in my system and it has a beautiful interface. Pure Music can sound extraordinary as well. It was my old stand-by “go to” music software before Roon. Audirvana Plus sounds very good as well. I liked Roon so much that I bought a life-time license. I’m still glad I did that.
After testing a number of players for Mac OS X I ended up with Audirvana+ and has been very happy with the sound. I started using Roon a couple of days ago, and even after some listening tests between Audirvana+ and Roon I don’t miss Audirvana+.