There’s a lot to love about Roon—when it works well, it’s a fantastic experience. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Over the past seven years, I’ve tried five different Roon Cores across three operating systems, used multiple routers, switches, endpoints, and cables, switched between two ISPs, and even moved between two completely different homes with entirely different setups. Yet somehow, Roon always ends up slowing down drastically at some point—seemingly out of the blue. Sometimes it’s perfectly snappy again the next day, only to crawl to a halt later on. It really feels like there are still issues with Roon that go beyond hardware or network setup. That’s the reason I have stopped recommending it to other people and advice them to look elswehere.
I had the same experience as you. In my case the problem was inadequate RAM. I had an extra 8 Gb (to 16 Gb) installed and most of the problems went away. Later, I needed to upgrade my Roon computer, which I did to an i7, this delivered further improvements in performance and fewer dropouts. I still, very occasionally, get problems and will, at some stage, install additional RAM on my current computer. These specs are well above the minimum specified by Roon.
My current Core is running on a 10th-gen i7 with 32GB of RAM, and I’ve also recently tried using a Mac Mini M2 Pro with 32GB, but unfortunately the issues persist. Some days everything runs smoothly, but other days it’s a struggle—search is painfully slow and still doesn’t handle spelling mistakes well, which is a major dealbreaker for me (especially since most other players manage this just fine). I’ve tested many completely different setups, but the performance inconsistencies remain. I know I’m not the only one experiencing this, though I’ve noticed that many users who’ve had similar problems have left the forum—possibly because honest feedback isn’t always well received here.
I did not delete my own post, strangely somehow it says that I did? My post is to question why Roon DSP is not that good relatively to the HQPlayer DSP upsampling?
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Computer power. One wouldn’t want to require that Roon users need to have a super high performance gaming PC, nor the support cases caused by performance limits.
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When reading HQ Player, it often seems like this is a specialist hobby where people spend more time trying out this or that math function than listening to music. In this sense it’s just fine to outsource this complexity. Little is gained by burdening the mainstream Roon user and the software with the additional complexity.
Actually, I was thinking of the simple DSP upsampling algorithms where you just simply upsampe or oversample the stream to 192/24 or DSD 256. Even for such simple DSP functions, it is evident that Roon makes everything sound worse, not better
I started my Roon core on a new Windows PC. I have a 14th generation i9 with 64 GB of memory. Music is stored on my data ssd NVMe. I haven’t had a single issue yet. Only time I had a buffering issue was with ARC on my android phone. It sporadically dropped out when cutting the lawn when I was in my front yard. Always works fine in the car.
Doesn’t seem that this is the thing you like most about Roon, so maybe deserves its own thread? 
Yes, sounds like Roon will have to do something for MUSE or completely forget it.