I am now retired but during my professional career I was a System Developer working in the financial industry. My core skills were designing and building Client/Server systems using Visual Basic, Sequel Server and Crystal Reports. I have a Masters Degree in Pure Mathematics.

I prefer listening to 70s/80s music, principally Progressive Rock, Singer/Songwriters and (British) Folk Rock. I have built up a large collection of digital music over the years much ripped from CD/DVD, some SACDs and many downloads.

Nearly all of my music is listened to in surround these days. My NUC Roon Server connects via HDMI to my Sony AV Receiver and plays through a 7.1 surround speaker setup by Acoustic Energy. My music is stored on a Synology NAS connected by ethernet driven by the Nest Wifi Pro.

For many years I have used the freeware software package Foobar2000 to play my music. I had designed my own user interface for Foobar2000 which reflected my approach to selecting the music to play - first genre, then artist, then album. I was also impressed with the open source DSP addon it had available called FreeSurround.

I have now invested in Roon primarily because of the dramatic improvement it made to sound quality. I need to get to grips with the user interface and adapting it to upmix my stereo tracks to surround.