If you have an old JRiver licence or you just want to experiment, in principle you can route roon audio via JRiver and BubbleUPnP. The JRiver WDM driver just exposes to roon as an endpoint like any other endpoint.
I got his working a while back and I preferred the sound. I don’t know if this still works with more recent versions of roon. A lot of changes in my system and I just dropped it because of the inconvenience. But I recently took delivery of a new DAC and I really don’t like the sound very much directly through roon so I think I will give it another go.
Well most here would disagree with that thought believing UPnP is simply inferior. Therefore, using RAAT protocol must sound better & often significantly better. This even more so when the discussion turns to cost ($5 lifetime vs Roon), as there’s a vested & psychological interest at play here. Of course, how one sets up Roon is likely critical; with Bubble it’s more plug & play.
My experience with both tells me that the sonic differences aren’t great, but I do clearly prefer Roon (not factoring the bells & whistles that come with Roon). I haven’t used Bubble (streamed via Minimserver) in a long while, I’ve gotten used to having to turn my laptop on to use Roon. Perhaps, I’ll have a trial over the weekend.
Notwithstanding, I feel I’m in a far better space, when I quit the comparisons and tinkering and just enjoy my music as is, using Roon.
And in practice, exactly the same.
I can assure everyone that 2 + 2 both in theory and practice is 4 - and you can’t help it.
And suggesting that is 5 could be manipulative…
You have way more confidence in the perfect electronic execution of signal processing theory than the many top designers I have known and worked with over decades.
When you run DSP on the Roon core, which setting -1dB will do without changing level much, what leaves it to the Linn endpoint are uncompressed PCM samples (which is what WAV is), not FLAC.
For Roon, the software that playback music is the music player built into Roon Core.
For DLNA/OpenHome, the software that playback music is the music player built into the network player.
For devices that support Roonn Ready, simply pass the data sent from Roon Core to the DAC as it is.
Roon is easier to understand if you think of it as playback music on a PC using a network. The playback environment is similar to PC audio.
With PC audio, quality of playback software and quality of PC have a great effect on the sound quality. Similarly for Roon, the quality of the PC running Ronn Core has a great impact on sound quality. Also, it becomes the sound tendency of the music player built in Roon Core.
This is the difference between Roon and DLNA/OpenHome.
Since the software that plays music and the equipment that runs it (Hardware, OS) are different between Roon and DLNA/OpenHome, it is clear that there is a difference in sound quality between them.
