What are Roon's real advantages over Audirvana+ or other similar Mac solutions?

You’d use HQP to optimally upsample your music to improve quality. Roon can also upsample but many find HQP – when dialed in and it takes some work to get there – to be superior to Roon (and frankly anything out there). You can find out about HQP here: https://www.signalyst.com/consumer.html. It’s creator Jussi Laako is active in the Roon community: https://community.roonlabs.com/c/audio-products/hq-player/27. It’s impressive tech.

Room correction in Roon can be tackled many ways. You can measure your room’s characteristics and create filters using Roon’s DSP tech to correct with tools like REW. There is a great tutorial for this: A Guide to Advanced Room Correction with REW and RePhase using Convolution filters and it’s creator is very helpful for those tackling this do-it-yourself approach.

You can also use an outside service from a company called Home Audio Fidelity: https://www.homeaudiofidelity.com/.

You take room measurements and they build you a convolution filter than can be integrated easily in Roon’s DSP tech to correct. Many, many Roon users (including me) have taken this approach and gotten impressive results.

Correcting for room issues is often one of the best things you can do to improve sound in your system.

As a final note, since you mentioned MQA, Roon has a unique ability to decode MQA files, apply DSP like room correction and then pass the modified file with MQA signaling intact to a DAC that can do the final rendering.

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