I bought my first streaming DAC in 2016, even though I wasn't yet convinced about streaming. Streaming audio was a great idea, but how would I get the music data from wherever it lives to my DAC's Ethernet port?
I was already a Roon user, but Roon and my DAC—a PS Audio DirectStream—weren't yet talking to each other. The experiences offered by the various control apps I tried were unsatisfying. I had a vision of how things ought to work, but the world didn't conform. Not yet.
I built up an Intel NUC and loaded it with ROCK—the Roon-Optimized Core Kit—and Roon. Soon, after some upgrades, Roon and my DAC were talking to each other, and I was up and streaming. I assembled my first network-attached storage (NAS) device, with 10TB of storage space shared, with redundancy, across four large hard drives, stashed in a back-room closet. The future of hi-fi—or should I say its present—was taking shape.
I was an early Roon adopter, but I always had complaints. For a product that sold itself on the richness of its information environment, it wasn't all that rich. Its design wasn't especially amenable to classical music (although it was as good as anything else). I spent a winter ripping all my CDs, editing metadata, and loading the music into my Roon library: I still have nightmares about importing boxed sets.
Meanwhile, Roon stubbornly refused to add certain, obvious features. As far as I can tell, they still haven't added a notes field where I can record such information as the optimal listening level for a particular recording.
Behind the scenes, though, the company was engaged in what it's clear in retrospect was a sophisticated, professional software-development effort. Roon was, and is, taking a long-term approach: When developers encountered structural limitations, they spent months reengineering whole sections of code.
Roon 1.8 is a big update. Visually, it's new, and to me, better. They've improved their recommendations engine, Valence. It's a major feature, and pretty good at recommending music, but for me that's not a big deal. More interesting and important are improvements to the Focus feature, a sophisticated hybrid of Search and Browse. Focus now encompasses streamed music from Tidal and Qobuz—not just music in your library. The music I own and the music I rent is now one big, searchable, browsable library.
People who love classical music are especially well-served by 1.8. Start by typing "Beethoven" into Search, then click on the composer's portrait at the top of the page. Click on Discography, then Focus. You can now filter Beethoven's works by type, performer, ensemble, and many other criteria. Display all the Beethoven albums in MQA (664 of them) or in high-rez FLAC (1183). With just one more click, you can list all available Beethoven releases by Glenn Gould or Fazil Say. In three clicks, I had a list of all the high-rez Beethoven chamber music (216 albums). With one more click, you can bring up a list of all the producers responsible for those recordings. (Is it possible to add Engineers to Focus? Can I do it myself?)
One day, not long after I'd been offered an opportunity to try out the 1.8 beta, I found myself listening to a new recording I thought sounded especially fine. Clicking on Credits, I learned that one of the engineers was Julian Schwenker. Clicking on his name summoned 67 albums on which he had a production role, including some in my library that I admire. Discogs lists 104 technical credits, so Roon—rather, Tidal and Qobuz plus my library, via Roon—is missing about a third of his recorded output, but now I have the actual music. I spent the rest of the evening sampling his work, looking for other great-sounding albums.
One day, I decided I wanted to compare versions of "La Donna è Mobile" from Rigoletto. I did what I thought made sense: searched for Verdi, clicked on his Composer link, clicked on Compositions, then used Focus to select "Aria" as the "Form." Only three aria recordings were listed, one of them transcribed for solo piano. I tried several other approaches to accessing the list of arias, but I never got the result I wanted. Roon isn't perfect.
I searched for Kind of Blue and found three versions in my library, four more on both Tidal and Qobuz. Roon had chosen one version by default. Clicking on Credits and scrolling down,
I saw Robert Palmer's name as an author of liner notes—but the link was to the late English singer/songwriter and not, as it should be, to the music writer who wrote Deep Blues and other excellent books. I found a second link, to the correct Robert Palmer, farther down the list.
Albums that have had several releases (like Kind of Blue) have all the production information lumped together: 50 names are listed in the production credits, including Rudy Van Gelder, several mastering engineers, and the two Robert Palmers. When I clicked on a different version of Kind of Blue, I saw exactly the same production credits. There is no differentiation by release. (Keeping track of releases and appropriate production credits is a tall order—maybe too tall—but it's what an optimized Roon would do.)
Finally, too many albums, including new releases, have little or no information. The recent Gearbox Records release Cherry Jam (mentioned in this issue's Revinylization, p.105) is available on Tidal and Qobuz—the latter at 24/192. The Roon listing, though, credits only the label, Don Cherry, and two composers. There's no album description and no other musicians or production personnel.
There's a lot of work to do still, as I'm sure the company would acknowledge. But with its most recent update, Roon has taken a key step toward fulfilling not only its own promise but the considerable promise of server-based and streaming audio.
