I consider myself lucky, in 2019 with the first download of Roon on a desktop purpose built for photo processing and a simple network (1g service, modem and Asus GT-AC5300 router) that Roon worked well enough on Wi-Fi to recognize the potential and get me hooked.
Had no prior experience with streaming music and nothing to compare it to. If I had encountered any of the issues posted by others I probably would have stayed with CD’s/SACD’s and a player.
But it worked. I ripped my CD collection, switched from Wi-Fi desktop to NUC/ROCK wired to the router, purchased the lifetime subscription, and had Ethernet ran throughout the house. Then followup up with a few Roon Ready endpoints. All my playback devices use RAAT, HDMI and Ethernet. No problems with drops, no problems with DB corruption, no problems with upgrades, it just works all the time. Fingers crossed and knocking on wood. Hope my luck continues.
Had a few minor issues with LAPTOP/IPAD remotes same as most folks but not any big deal, cycling the app resolves those.
I don’t understand the bigger issues since I’ve not experienced them. And prefer not to. Based on the earlier comments here it is giving Roon a bad rep.
Roon fits my needs perfectly, no desire to try other options. I’m all in now and it is the heart of my musical enjoyments. I’ve demonstrated the functionality to friends and family and they like it but don’t know if they followed up. I even gave a family member a year sub for Christmas and he did try it out but he was already setup with Plex and didn’t keep it up. Not a big enough advantage or other things were more important.
I do think this kind of excellent experience would be possible for more people if local dealers recognized the opportunity to provide it as a service. Many folks are perfectly willing to pay an integrator to install and configure a Crestron system in their homes. I’m sure that a lot of folks would also be willing to pay for an integrator to build out the kind of system that you have created.
Great experiences with Roon are too often isolated to folks like us who have the time, skills, and inclination to build out a robust home network and get everything installed and configured, train family members, etc. However, I’d be surprised if there was not an untapped market out there for integrators to provide turn-key whole-house Roon systems.
That is true and I have experienced it by accident. Had a flooring company out to resolve some issues from a job they had done for us. They even brought a chemical specialist to help determine if it was their problem to fix or our cost for a redo. The chem person noticed the system and asked for a demo. He loved everything about it, offered to buy the house with all its issues if I would leave the system intact. Nope, can’t do that. So he said he was going to build a house in the area and wanted to know if I would oversee the installation of a similar system in his house. Sure, I’d be willing to do that. Haven’t heard anything since then but his excitement was real. He knows where I live when/if the time is right.
BTW, the flooring was removed and replaced at no cost to us. That was the best part.
What a pejorative sweeping statement to make! I’m probably in that demographic you mention and I certainly wouldn’t consider myself “technically challenged” as you put it. I would say the same for many of my friends. WRT your term “elderly audiophiles” many of us you seem to disparage have acquired knowledge and experience with audio equipment through the evolution of the technology over the past 50 years or more including the more recent shift to streaming.
I’d also put it to you to factually back up your assertion “the vast majority is technically challenged”? It’s generalised uncorroborated opinions like this that reinforces biases against ageing in our societies.
I enjoy Roon and mostly enjoy the community discussions but every now an opinion like the one expressed above leaves me disappointed.
I didn’t say all. But you are right that many older ones acquired and sometimes developed the knowledge in the first place, like the UK guys in the early seventies. Unfortunately, nowadays “audiophile” seems to mean something else.
I should have said many that post on forums like this
I had to look up the definition of Audiophile on Wikipedia. It was a long read that extended into too much detail. I extracted 2 sentences from that definition that appeared to simplify things, at least to me
“An audiophile is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction.”
“In general, the values of an audiophile are seen to be antithetical to the growing popularity of more convenient but lower quality music, especially lossy digital file types like MP3 lower definition streaming services, and inexpensive headphones.”
Based on those 2 sentences it appears I’m considered an audiophile. I am enthusiastic about well recorded music that moves me in some way, and equipment that can reproduce that music as it was recorded. The equipment has to include the music storage and delivery mechanism which for me is Roon with Tidal /Qobuz.
I have a somewhat local dealer who understands Roon and runs it in his shop. It’s what he hands customers to select music to play even on his “reference” set-up. I never asked if they do Roon installs but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. This shop has a few advantages… they do more custom home theater installs than they do 2-channel systems. They also install custom automation (Crestron and others) and lighting. This means a few things are already well in place: 1) They already have the network expertise to lay a solid network foundation for Roon. 2) They are already in the customer’s home. 3) They already have staff in trucks and in the field.
Roon isn’t a sell and forget for a dealer. The customer will come back asking for support. You can make money on this kind of support but only if you establish a support relationship upfront. It’s not like selling a box and never hearing from the customer again until they want to upgrade.
This creates a problem with the majority moving to self-service. Roon, from a self-service perspective, is a bit of a mess. All the IT know-how that a lot of us take for granted because we’re “tech” is a fairly severe learning curve for everyone else. Heck, I’m not surprised if this is the very first “forum” some Roon users have ever logged into because they needed help. I’ve been logging into “user forums” almost all my life.
If I was a dealer selling Roon I’d put it on a server with remote access and I’d run server instead of ROCK so I had some control over things. That would at least save me from rolling a truck half the time. But, knowing how to do that and manage that at scale, securely, comes from many years in IT. I’d be perfect selling Roon but I have no experience selling speakers… my “hifi store” would probably fail but Roon would be fine.
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Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
28
That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? Many of us overestimate our understanding of new technologies. I would certainly consider myself “technically challenged”. I have only the dimmest understanding of the analog side of this hobby.
The world has changed a great deal since 1970. And audio more than a little. Many of the lessons learned in the 1970’s about audio no longer apply to the post-1983 digital revolution. More than just that, the post-VLSI and post-Internet and post-SoC and post-iPhone worlds. And nobody can learn those changes simply through experience with audio equipment. Or through interactions with advertising venues such as magazines and/or audio emporiums and/or YouTube “experts”.
It’s amazing how much technology has been developed in the past twenty years. Before that we must have been living in caves. All those elderly audiophiles must be very grateful to the youth you represent. Otherwise they’d still be flint knapping and writing in cuneiform.
I’m not young but we don’t have to pretend that many older people or audiophiles who grew up with analog don’t have a hard time with digital developments
Pls allow my opinion. I’m not looking to be disrespectful
I teach image editing, so apps on computers. While the majority of my students are very young I do have elderly ones. Over 15 years of doing that so I can say: within their groups there is not much difference, same percentage of being technically challenged. And the main focus of my department it is somehow far from any tech
I don’t doubt that there are technically challenged young people as well, and young people who like complaining, but there are less of those who are well off and have big stereo systems. And of course older people with an interest in learning something can do that just as well. That doesn’t really have to be mentioned as it’s obvious.
20 years of professional experience in customer software support nevertheless has told me a bit about what the distribution is.
There sure are lots of people who are easy to offend in all age groups
For the purpose of my post it started when regular people started to interact with it in their daily lives. Von Neumann is not who I talked about. Come on, you know very well what I meant
In 1928 when IBM introduced punched cards, or 1947 with the invention of the transistor? Specifically with regards to audio, probably around 1984 when cd’s became commercially available.
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Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
37
1837, when Samuel Morse patented his dot-dash telegraph?
Zero. I don’t know anybody in my personal life (friends, coworkers, neighbors, extended family) who is an audiophile, nevermind who would set up a server at home and keep it running just to listen to music.
I have introduced many people to Roon.
But I have only met one or two people who knew about it before I introduced them to it. They had never used it, only read about it.
Most people’s response is that is amazing, but I will stick with Spotify. It’s a niche market
The difficulty is not digital audio. It’s digital audio using “network” as a back-plane or interconnect. This isn’t the only industry making the shift from stuff that used to stay in a box to now leaking that stuff out onto “network”.
The learning curve when things go wrong gets steeper because there is a lot more going wrong… or at least places for it to go wrong.