After the last Sonos Controller update this is much more true! I now switched to 100% for all Sonos control actions to Roon. Sonos pushed themselves back behind Roon (in respect to controllers).
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Why did I decide to buy Roon?
That’s a good question and this thread has helped me think about whether I really need it.
I had hoped Roon would provide me with a richer experience in exploring new music - kind of like the allmusic.com site with lots of metadata, liner notes artist bios and suggestions about related artists and music.
It does this to some extent but so does just native Tidal. It would need to do much more to have value for me.
As for music management capabilities, that is not very important to me. I have maybe 500 digital albums but I have nearly 10 times as many vinyl records and since the advent of Tidal I have not felt the need to buy any new digital while I continue to buy vinyl. I don’t think the future for owned digital music libraries is very bright.
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Agree completely rrwwss52 - that’s why I would prefer to rent such things it at an annual cost.
Same here, so far I am paying yearly and that’s fine for me. Something about paying $500 for a lifetime seems risky, which is odd because I have paid a lot more for hardware I had never seen. What I bought Roon for was it’s whole house integration and DSP features. The ability to use RP3s as endpoints was the immediate reason I adopted Roon. Streaming Tidal was a plus. I have not even had time to explore c) yet.
I have to laugh at myself about one thing that may shed some light on why people don’t buy Roon. I’ve been in and around audio, networks and electronics all my life but the first time I heard of Roon I went to their webpage to see what it was all about. Honestly, I couldn’t understand all the fuss. I went back 3 or 4 times and read everything including a lot on these forums. It slowly dawned on me what I could do with Roon. I guess I’m retarded when it comes to making a Sea change like Roon. I tried Roon for 2 weeks and didn’t wait until the 2 weeks were up to buy a year’s worth because I thought at the very least it added $10 a month worth of value. It was only after I had bought Roon and lived with it a couple of months that the lightbulb went off. I have gone full circle and now run Rock on a NUC which I never planned to own–had never even dreamed of owning. My conclusion is that Roon is so complex and multi-layered that a friend touting it, or even a 2 week trial, is just not sufficient to grasp just how useful and good Roon really is. I can’t wait for the portable solution. I just added Poly to my Mojo and Roon works at home. I can make it work as a mobile device but moving the core around each time is going to be a PITB. Pleez, we need a simple mobile solution!
How Roon wants to run their billing and business is up to them. For me it was take it or leave it like most other purchases I make.
I have only a few vinyl, but to also integrate and not to forget I simply draw the ones available in Tidal into my Roon library and tag accordingly. Result: Surfing through my library brings the vinyls up as well as explicitly selecting for the vinyl tag. Than I can decide to stand up and dig out the vinyl and start the turntable…
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+1 here, that would be a great idea!
Interesting: several voices here are arguing for renting on an annual basis rather than paying outright, or renting on a monthly basis. Or daily?
The trend toward renting, paying incrementally, is overwhelming. When we started providing cloud computing, we wanted to rent servers per month; nowadays the cloud provides fractions of a core, charged at milliseconds…
And in other threads, here and in other forums (Microsoft, Adobe…), people are screaming bloody murder about the ripoff of rental as opposed to lifetime sales.
Challenging to run a business these days, whether you’re a startup or the establishment.
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^^I’m in that exact situation, as are all the music lovers I’ve shown Roon. We love it, but it adds too little value (for us) to justify the cost or the commitment of signing up for a year. Here’s how I use Roon:
Sure, it looks great, but it doesn’t do anything (for me) that Foobar2000 can’t do, except look good. However, once mobile/wan support comes along, I’ll be able to set up a Roon server at home and have access to ALL my music, instead of just the files that can fit on a 200gb microSD card plugged into my laptop. Once that killer feature is available, I’ll be willing to commit to an annual membership.
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Totally understand 
I was thinking about what you wrote above:
If I was primarily listening to music in one room then the comparative (to other software like Foobar) value of Roon would potentially be: Metadata, UI functionality and design aesthetics. These may or may not be desirable or worth while to someone.
My use case is a good HiFi in the living room with other hardware that can then extend music to the rest of the flat with reliable multi-room. I like a high quality HiFi but also moving around with the music following. Controlling the music (e.g. play count and tagging) and the hardware is important.
Sonos came close to the above (I was a user for many years and may buy again) but it fell short in many ways.
Roon offers more for the above use case and that made my mind up to buy a lifetime subscription (about a year ago).
Love the screens by the way
Well my 9 year old daughter loves roon…as do all her friends. It seems like all the neighbourhood kids come to her room to play with it.
Now that a good part of the interface is in Dutch it’s even better for them
An ipad mini with with iPeng and a Librarone Zipp… easy.
I truly hate their choice of music! So she’s already on track 
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The same people who were probably shelling out for each incremental release Word, Word 2.0, Word 2000, Word 2013, Word 2016.
“Lifetime”, haha.
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Well, as it happens, I was definitely experiencing a lower cost of ownership under the old Office pricing schemes. I would probably still be there, if Microsoft hadn’t made the subscription model practically the only game in town. It’s all water under the bridge now, of course. As Anders says, the subscription model is the future. I fully expect Windows and OSX to follow suit.
At the risk of going further off topic though, your model assumes that MS will provide you with security patches free of charge ad infinitum (or you’re happy to cross your fingers). Not so much of a problem in the days of limited connectivity. These days it’s almost inescapable and brings its own problems.
The thing is, it does bring up the thorny issue of continuous development and who pays for it.
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Not ad infinitum, just until it made sense to do the next package upgrade. Fortunately, Microsoft’s support horizon was longer than their package upgrade cycle…
Interesting that the main topic of discussion here is how to pay for the Stereophile “Budget” product of the year.
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Out of the given options I’m mostly C, but also:
e) good price for lifetime, now that it’s still available
f) availability of different price/quality endpoints for different use cases
So these three.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, but if I buy Roon lifetime + RaspberryPi3 with a fancy case, HifiBerry hat and power supply it’ll set me back ~525€
If I buy a Bluesound Node 2, I’m again paying for the software (which can’t compete with Roon, at least yet) and the hardware and it’ll set me back 599€
Already Roon is cheaper, but for some reason people can justify buying Bluesound Node 2 without feeling the need to complain in the forums about the pricing. Go figure.
Next identical endpoint for Roon is 100€, and for Bluesound it’s 599€ as I’m paying for the software again.
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I don’t know anyone who pays for a music service. If they use on then it is free spotify. My wife listens to the same 20 odd CDs. My kids pay for Netflix but not music.
Anyone on this forum is, by definition, an outlier.
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The majority of my friends tend to use Spotify on Sonos. Roon cannot compete with that as essentially it does everything they need.
I accept that I am perhaps an outlier in my group but they all like parties at my house !!!
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Interesting sequence of comments.
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