I understand the benefits of Roon as a standalone app.
Same answer.
Maybe the thread has drifted away from your original question. You seem to be in a bit of a catch-22.
Sounds like you have assembled a local library of b-sides, live tracks and obscurities in poor digital quality. Probably 16/64 or at best 16/128 (youtube). But the material is important to you and cannot be found on commercial CD’s, downloads or streaming services. As you have discovered none of the players (including roon) are designed to improve the sound quality of poor quality rips and none of the streaming services (Tidal or Qobuz) have the catalogue depth to replace the material with better quality swap-ins. Upgrading the hardware, Bose at home, Hyundai in the car won’t help much either. Better speakers are just going to make the material sound worse (you will hear the compression artifacts more clearly) and roon doesn’t work in the car anyway.
If your local library really is important to you, is irreplaceable but unlistenable at the moment you are better off looking at audio processing software, before looking at players like roon or upgrading your hardware. There are plenty of reasons to use roon with a streaming service but maybe your priorities are different at the moment? The downside is that the learning curve is extremely steep. That may or may not be worth it to you. Only you can answer that but it’s worth investing some time to find out. We all have time on our hands at the moment after all. Audacity has already been mentioned. I use Goldwave and Unchirp because they have features I find useful for cleaning up vinyl rips and historical recordings. They might have features that help in your particular case or others might suggest alternatives.
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Interesting. Thanks, Tony.