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If you are a music fan, you shouldn‘t be listening to mp3. It‘s as easy as that. There are much better audio options, we have huge possibilities in storage, there is no excuse really for mp3s. Musicians give their best, recording engineers give their best, labels try their best, no reason to destroy it afterwards.
It all depends on the quality of the codec and the bitrate. Blind listening tests show that most people can't hear a difference between lossless and mp3 / AAC at 256 kbps using a good quality modern codec, and once you get to 320 kbps, the listening test scores come down to random chance.
Here's an online listening test where you can see if this is true for yourself:
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
I do agree, though, with storage space being so cheap these days, it just makes more sense to go lossless.
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So I am not sure if and what Roon will really bring to the table, or if it brings anything at all (yes, nice cross-references with various artists and albums, neat, but not essential... in classical music, that information is often already in booklets anyway) but I am willing to try it out for three months. :-D
Let me know what you think of it after the eval period.
Yeah, will do.
We use it extensively for demos here, since it passes all different formats at their native resolution to hardware that supports those resolutions. It's optimized for sound quality above all else. It also has a very good DSP section for EQ and other effects - often it can be used to surgically fix problems with speakers that benefit from EQ.
It also lets you get into the weeds re: recording formats, codecs, etc.
That's all cool, though as I said, my setup is straightforward, my own music is on a NAS, and I use Qobuz for streaming.
Now my streamer (a T+A device) just plays everything I throw at its DAC... MP3, FLAC, ALAC, WAV, even DSD, so in my setup, I don't see how Roon would (or should) have any influence on the sound quality at all. It just delivers the files to my DAC? Nothing else to do for it.
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Actually, I doubt it will do anything for sound quality (though they claim it will).
Do you care if you can mix Qobuz tracks in with your own library seamlessly and into your playlists?
Do you care that their database links you to reviews, background info on musicians, composers, producers, etc.?
On my end, I always tell people - if you want better sound quality, upgrade your speakers, or make sure the acoustics in your room are decent.
Competent electronics have almost no effect on sound quality, nor should they. Their job is just to pass through the signal without editorializing on it. Not that hard to do. 
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Actually, I doubt it will do anything for sound quality (though they claim it will).
That would be an odd claim. Why would a FLAC/ALAC delivered by Roon sound differently than the same FLAC/ALAC delivered by MinimServer or Asset UPnP?
Do you care if you can mix Qobuz tracks in with your own library seamlessly and into your playlists?
Not really... In fact, that would probably be more odd... I usually listen to albums (or parts of albums, like a symphony on a classical album), and only have a few playlists for certain occasions. I do have a few playlists on my NAS and a few playlists on Qobuz, but nothing important, they don't have to mix... nothing I could not re-do relatively swiftly.
Do you care that their database links you to reviews, background info on musicians, composers, producers, etc.?
That seems to be the most interesting thing. But not that important. But the background information and "connecting the dots" feature is actually the most interesting thing about it.
On my end, I always tell people - if you want better sound quality, upgrade your speakers, or make sure the acoustics in your room are decent.
Competent electronics have almost no effect on sound quality, nor should they. Their job is just to pass through the signal without editorializing on it. Not that hard to do.
Fully agree with that, that's why I'm sure Roon will not effect sound quality. (Why would an ALAC or FLAC file played via Roon sound better? Makes no sense.... the bits and bytes arriving at the DAC should be the same?)
Now the one thing that can still make quite a difference in sound quality besides speakers is your amp, especially if your speakers tend to be power-hungry and the amp cannot sufficiently drive them.
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Posted: |
Nov 30, 2024 - 4:15 AM
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By: |
MusicMad
(Member)
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As someone who has thought about (not more!) Roon, I'm grateful to you Nick for having posted those images. Unless there's a way of breaking down those box sets into individual works within the main library then I know Roon is not for me. I have spent many hours building my music library (Lossless, within WMA and converted to FLAC for streaming using AssetNAS) and I want to see the "album" I'm looking to play without delving into a box set to find, e.g., disc 14, trs. 1-4 (from, say, 8).
Maybe Roon will provide this ... e.g. my library for the same work by Brahms reads from the menu options "Album Artist / B / Brahms,Johannes":
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Abbado/BPO]
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Ansermet/OSR]
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Giulini/CSO]
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Giulini/VPO]
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Karajan/BPO/1977]*
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Karajan/PO]
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Kleiber/VPO]
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Klemperer/PO]
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Solti/CSO]
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Stokowski/PO]
Symphony #4, Op.98 in E minor [Wand/NDR]
Each "album" will be supported in AssetNAS by an image which is, wherever possible, the original LP/CD front cover.
Of these, only the Kleiber recording was bought as a single disc, others were from collections by Composer or Conductor or Label.
Will Roon allow you to see all recordings of this symphony (you have Chailly, Abbado and Böhm in those collections) or will you have to select via Conductor, Orchestra ... or Box Set (yuk!)?
You also made reference to Roon's selection for "Artist" and "Album Artist". For me, with classical (& soundtrack) the latter has to be the Composer with the performer (e.g. Conductor, Orchestra, Soloist) as the "Artist". Once these are mixed a library of thousands of recordings will be unmanageable. I also prefer "Brahms,Johannes" as this makes scanning lists far easier (e.g. SoundtrackCollector.com uses "John Barry", "Roy Budd", etc. which is more difficult to scan quickly).
If Roon merely reflects what's in your own library there should be no problem but if it seeks to standardise everything in its algorithm generated format, I'm definitely not interested
(*I usually only include the year to distinguish where required but here the 4 symphony cycle from the mid-80s included the non-digital 1977 recording - apparently Karajan did not sanction release of the later digital recording - and so I included the year for when I sort by Conductor as I have both recordings of each of the first three symphonies).
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Ah, great! I’ll be happy to share my experiences. A while back, I mentioned that I was planning to test various music server software. Since there wasn’t much response, I assumed the topic might not be of interest to most folks, which I completely understand.
https://filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=157602&forumID=7&archive=0
(Maybe I transfer and continue it over there in the end.)
I’ve always wanted to try out Roon, but its trial period was only a week(!). That felt too short to justify the effort. Setting up Roon—especially without knowing how long it might take—only to have a single week to explore its features didn’t seem worth it. I don’t even listen to music every day, so a week isn’t much time to assess its capabilities. However, when they offered a heavily discounted Black Friday three-month trial, I thought, Why not? Let’s do this.
As MusicMad’s post aptly illustrates, we music enthusiasts all have different needs and preferences. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to how music software should work or present content. We may share a passion for music—particularly film music, as evidenced by this board—but we differ greatly in how we want to organize and access our collections. So before diving into my experience with Roon, I thought I’d briefly explain how and why I organize my music files the way I do. Different needs, after all, call for different approaches.
For legacy reasons (I started with iTunes), all my music files are in ALAC format. It’s essentially the same as FLAC but integrates better with Apple devices and iTunes. Ironically, I'm on Windows and could easily use FLAC, but that's another story, and I'm hesitant to convert thousands of ALACs to FLAC. Either format is just as fine anyway.
Since classical music is a major focus of my collection—and iTunes was clearly designed with pop music in mind—I had to develop a system that worked for me.
Most casual listeners are satisfied with basic tags like “artist,” “title,” and sometimes “album.” For example, “Winter Wonderland” (Title) by “Robbie Williams” (Artist) from the album “The Christmas Present”. Very few people bother to include the composer (Felix Bernard, in this case—I looked it up because my tags are meticulous ??). While I think composer information is valuable, even for pop music, many listeners are content with just “artist” and “title.” But as collections grow in complexity, spanning multiple genres, the limitations of this minimal tagging approach become evident.
I still use iTunes to curate my collection because if I can make it work there, it usually works everywhere else too. Programs like MusicBee allow for far more specific tagging, but many other platforms don’t fully support those additional tags. For instance, iTunes now lets you tag classical music with “work,” which looks great in iTunes but might not display correctly on a car stereo.
My Tagging Requirements:
Cross-Platform Compatibility: Tags must work seamlessly across devices—iTunes, my home stereo app, Android music players, my car stereo, and so on.
Clear Identification: For pop music, “Englishman in New York” by “Sting” might be sufficient, but for classical music, “Allegro” by “Haydn” definitely isn’t.
Consistency: Tags must be uniform (e.g., always “Ludwig van Beethoven” rather than a mix of “Beethoven, L. van,” “LvB,” or “F.J. Haydn (1732–1809)”).
Classical music collectors often face the challenge of managing multiple recordings of the same piece. Consistent tagging helps keep everything organized. For instance, I own three complete Beethoven symphony cycles conducted by Herbert von Karajan, each tagged to distinguish them:
Album: Beethoven: Symphonies / Karajan (1977) (or 1963, or 1984, depending on the cycle). This helps differentiate one cycle from another.
Album Artist: Ludwig van Beethoven. Since iTunes uses “Album Artist” for folder structure, I use this tag for composers in classical music. I prefer “Ludwig van Beethoven” without inversion (e.g., not “Beethoven, Ludwig van”), as it looks cleaner, and I use sorting tags to ensure it’s filed under “B.”
Artist: Herbert von Karajan: Berliner Philharmoniker. Ideally, there would be fields for multiple performers, like soloists, conductor, and orchestra, but most programs don’t handle that well.
Genre: Classical. Unfortunately, not all programs support multiple genres.
Year: 1977 (the recording or release year).
Title: Beethoven: Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 I. Adagio molto - Allegro con brio. For generic titles like “Symphony No. 1,” I preface the composer’s name for clarity.
Unlike MusicMad, I prefer to keep boxed sets intact. For example, my Karajan Beethoven cycles are tagged as single albums (e.g., Disc 1, Disc 2, etc.), rather than splitting them into individual discs or compositions. I then often still give the individual discs individual cover images. This reduces clutter and makes browsing easier for me, though I understand why others might prefer a different approach.
The way it looks in my iTunes: Boxed Set Covers:
The way it looks in my iTunes: individual Covers for the various discs:
I typically don’t split discs into separate albums, even when they contain multiple works. This is partly practical: tools like PerfectTunes help me periodically verify disc integrity (e.g., ensuring bit-perfect rips), but only if the disc is complete.
Finally, My First Impressions of Roon:
I’m still exploring it, so I don’t have much to report yet. However, I noticed something strange right away—where is Jerry Goldsmith? When I searched under “composers,” he didn’t show up. That’s odd because I expected him to be listed there. It turns out there’s a setting for “show only classical composers,” which seems to exclude Jerry Goldsmith. Hmm… we’ll see how this goes!
Nice clean UI. The setup was very easy. I installed it on my QNAP NAS, set the directory for the database (on an M.2 drive) and directed it to the folder of my music. It started to create the database and it did find my main streaming unit right away and works.... Easy basic configuration! So now I can do some testing.
Some albums show up double currently, perhaps because I have them on my NAS but also marked as favorite in Qobuz?
Some things I noticed right away:
1. Qobuz changed some of the covers I have. (Qobuz did NOT change the files, just displayed its own covers... don't know yet if that is configurable, there are a lot of settings.)
2. Inconcistency:
The Nic Raine recording for HOURS OF THE GUN gets the year 1967... so that's the year of the original film.
The Karajan Beethoven recording gets the year 1993... which is the neither the composition nor the recording date but the remastering year for that particular recording from 1984.
But hey, I'm just starting and trying it out.
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Posted: |
Dec 1, 2024 - 2:54 AM
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By: |
MusicMad
(Member)
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Thanks, Nick, for all the info and the images ... these are very useful in helping me to understand how this interface works. I am left with the big question, though: what would Roon bring to the table for me? I can access all albums in my library (now>12,00 albums / 87,000 tracks) to stream by album title or via album artist or, indeed, "performing" artist, year or genre, often using a combination (e.g. my wife often selects an album from the classical album artist by seeking year ... but is wary when the album is, say Cello Encores [Fournier/Lush] as she knows this may include works from more than one year).
Similar to you, I started this journey ripping CDs and then finding a way to catalogue them. For me, having been conversant with MS Windows I opted for WMA, initially streaming to a Logitech Squeezebox. It was only when I upgraded to a Hi-Fi streamer - and found to my horror that it did not accept WMA - I found how to convert my (then) small library into FLAC.
Classical works, and to an extent, Soundtracks (which at that time were the majority of my collection) created problems which is why I decided to use "composer" as the album artist even though this is contrary to how CDs (and downloads) show the info. Also, Various Artists never seemed to work consistently but happily this no longer causes me sleepless nights
Another issue revealed by your images is the amount of space wasted ... it's as if the screen you're presented with is the back of an LP sleeve. For me, my control points are iPhone and iPad (also an old iPod which does work if I don't unplug it!) and so space is at a premium. With some works it's difficult to see all the relevant info and I fear a screen, such as those above re: Karajan or Hour of the Gun would mean I'd not see what the tracks titles, etc. are.
Hence, I'm unconvinced as to Roon's usefulness ... or perhaps have more firmly convinced myself that Roon is not for me.
Thanks again for all the info, etc.
Mitch
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Thanks, Nick, for all the info and the images ... these are very useful in helping me to understand how this interface works. I am left with the big question, though: what would Roon bring to the table for me?
Good question. We both have extensive collections and already spent some time considering tagging and how we want our music to be organized and presented, have set up a music sever and configured it to present the music in a way that we want. We have done a lot of the work that Roon is designed to do for you already, so obviously, it brings less to the table for us than for many other people. If you have a cluttered, unorganized music collection with non-unified tags, Roon seems to be able to bring it into an organized and presentable form with just a few clicks. That's pretty cool, even though it is of no relevance for you. Not sure if there is much that Roon can do for us that we don't already do.
So far, I quite like the interface and that it is amazingly simple to set up (if you have the hardware) and works. It immediately found my (Roon Ready) streamer and everything worked out of the box as expected.
I will post my next "Roon posts" over in this thread, as this has more to do with the technical capabilities, so it's not constantly up on the "film music" side of the board:
https://filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=157602&forumID=7&archive=0
One thing that I just discovered and will try out next (haven set it up yet). Roon ARC
So you can play your entire own music collection from anywhere via Roon, which seems to be pretty nifty feature I admit. I don't think I'd pay the hefty Roon price tag just for that, but it is a good feature. I'll try it out.
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If you are a music fan, you shouldn‘t be listening to mp3. It‘s as easy as that. There are much better audio options, we have huge possibilities in storage, there is no excuse really for mp3s. Musicians give their best, recording engineers give their best, labels try their best, no reason to destroy it afterwards.
It all depends on the quality of the codec and the bitrate. Blind listening tests show that most people can't hear a difference between lossless and mp3 / AAC at 256 kbps using a good quality modern codec, and once you get to 320 kbps, the listening test scores come down to random chance.
Here's an online listening test where you can see if this is true for yourself:
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
I do agree, though, with storage space being so cheap these days, it just makes more sense to go lossless.
That listening test isn't all that useful for me, as all the sounds would come out over built in laptop speakers on my side. My computer just isn't connected to any higher end speakers or headphones. But apart from that, I will say that it's a misconception to think blind tests are in any way sufficient to sway one to listen to MP3s or any other inferior sound format, if better formats are so readily (and often cheaper... let's face it, Qobuz often sells high-res files for less than Amazon sells MP3 files of the same album) available. The mere knowledge that it is an inferior sound format is already enough for me to not consider that. Just because one could not distinguish some MP3s from a lossless or high-res file doesn't mean one could never distinguish any MP3 from a lossless/high-res file of the same quality. Just because oneself would not be able to do that also does not mean nobody would ever be able to do it. I did make a blind listening test between CD and MP3 format years ago, and there were cases where it was easy to distinguish between the CD sound and the MP3 sound, interestingly especially in chamber or solo instrumental works rather than orchestral works. Pop music was the most difficult to discern I admit.
But, most importantly, very often, imperfections in recordings and music files become only evident if you really know what to listen for and focus on it. But once you have heard them, you can never "unhear" them again. Lossless rips at least help you there: if it's an AccurateRip confirmed rip, you know it's not the file, but that it is on the original CD, so you don't have to worry about it, nothing you can do about it. That's what happened to me with the imperfection at the opening track on the 50th anniversary release of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. It was an AccurateRip confirmed file, so it's on the CD, nothing one can do about it. Move on.
And last but not least, even if hearing is lost one day due to age, or maybe you become deaf on one ear, that would be no reason to switch to MP3 or mono and think "it's good enough". I don't even consider myself particularly audiophile. For me, it's about listening to music without fuzz, I don't spend too much time thinking about formats, gear, or setups. In fact, that's one reason I pick only lossless or high-res files, because I don't have to worry at all about whether any sound information is lost. It's not, period. So it's worry free. The mere idea of the possibility to listen to an inferior sound format would be enough to impair listening enjoyment, regardless of whether any difference is directly heard.
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