Roon - the next step?

[amabrok]

Guys help me out, am I getting crazy or what?!

For the sake of staying with Roon I was ready to trade my beautifully sounding Aurender to a Roon Nucleus or Innuos Zenith. I was this close, but then last night I noticed that my Aurender appears as a Roon end point, albeit on Airplay. so I gave it a try and to my biggest surprise it sounded better than Roon on Air/Wifi! I was always under the impression that Airplay is an average wireless audio transmission protocol with bandwidth limitation and accordingly has a negative impact on signal path and hence sound quality. in Roon, signal path from the core all the way to my D400 through Aurender/Airplay appears with a green dot indicating "High Quality" and not a the purple dot that indicates an all "Lossless" path with Roon on Air/Wifi

I realize that I need to do some more rigorous testing but the initial finding took me by surprise. Has any of you tried Roon over Airplay? And what was the experience like?

Another recent advent as well makes me wanna stick with my Aurender is the release of an MQA decoding software. Now the Aurender X100 can unfold MQA files and send them as HiRes PCM with sampling rates of 88.2 or 96Khz and bit depth of 24 or 32 to my D400. With the ever growing MQA library on Tidal this can't get any better and the initial feel of the sound quality is impressive on the direct USB audio connection.

When Roon was released with with air I gave it a try, I really wanted to like and go for a one box solution, but the gap to the Aurender was to big in my system.
The Aurender just sound more relaxede, I found Roon over Air to be ”eager” to finish the music, or to put in other words the Aurender lets the instruments sing longer.

Maybe it is the same you hear?

I will have to live with two boxes and the brown interface

I fully agree that Aurender sounds better. I always raved about how it sounds warm and relaxed yet detailed. But that is of course for the direct USB connection to my D400.

The thing that puzzled me is how Roon on Aurender Airplay sounds better than Roon / Air!

Among the many valuable answers I got here from other members, one talks about the importance of implementation, so while Airplay is limited only to high quality and not lossless, it seems that Aurender implementation is done in a way that enhances how it sounds. For now I will have to live with this assumption and accept it.

Moving forward the plan is to get my hands on a dedicated roon server/player (Zenith or Nucleus) and see how they play in my system.

But in all cases, I belive Aurneder is a keeper at least for now.


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