Or perhaps they wish to receive what they will be expected to pay for on June 16th.
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That is true in my ears.
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The real question is how representative is the forum , how many vocal users versus how many happy users. I suspect an impossible question to answer.
The subscription concept is muddying the waters , people who would normally post have a technical issue not a commercial issue.
Personally I have a technical issue, I have no opinion on subscription. While I cannot stream to my streamer I cannot evaluate sound quality.
If we could divorce the 2 elements it would clear the air a bit
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At first I was amazed of the AS SQ but after some weeks and checking A-B again vs A 3.5 and Roon I am disappointed. The interface of AS is full of bugs and SQ is somehow artificial. Also I think that AS has clipping problems when using upsampling. It has simply no headroom management and volume is not turned down somehow automatically.
As another user found out AS is louder than A 3.5 and that is bad because of clipping danger.
I remembered my old LP 12 based analogue Linn sound system and that is just another world in SQ and musicality. Compared to that I can say the following:
- A 3.5 sounds more natural and less artificial than AS so for me there is no reason to subscribe.
- Roon is worth every € (subscription/license) because the interface is lightyears better than both A 3.5 and AS.
SQ is simply more natural and more musical (more like Linn analogue) and it has no clipping problems since it has a very good headroom management. - If I listen longer to AS it simply gets on my nerves sounding too hard and even sometimes distorted (clipping). That’s hard but it’s the way I see and hear it.
So I will stay mainly with Roon and use sometimes my licensed A 3.5 for a change.
End of the story.
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To which version of AS do you refer? 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 or 1.3?
Is there a SQ change between them ?
I did not find significant differences between the AS versions - I listened to all of them. My last impression was based on comparing 1.2 / 1.3 with A 3.5 and Roon.
VoyagerDude says he hears differences between the in bit-perfect mode.
With 1.3, I had the impression that it sounded better than the previous versions in bit-perfect mode, but could not compare because I did not keep the previous versions. But in 1.3 I had crackles while upsampling, both in r8brain and SoX modes. I had no crackles while upsampling PCM files to DSD256.
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I did not have problems with crackling - only when using Kernel Mode (W10) and upsampling with r8brain (witch for me is the best of AS) I had problems when skipping tracks with different resolutions.
When using bit-perfect (without any changes of the original) I call this ‘vanilla’ - the differences between A 3.5 / Roon / Qobuz vanilla were very very little.
Since my old soundchip VIA VT2021 is not so good at 16/44.1 kHz I am not so interested in this mode.
We are not on the same versions, since I’m on Mac.
1.3 fixed some bugs in the Mac version that were related to the sound restitution. So when I heard 1.3 in “vanilla” mode, as you call it, I immediately had the impression the sound was improved. VoyagerDude, who is also on Mac, told me that he had the same impression too.
When I listened to the previous versions while upsampling with r8brain, I also noticed an improvement over SoX.
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To be honest, I don’t understand why upsampling and the like. Without this (bit perfect), the sound is much cleaner and SQ is better.
By very far, Audirvana. No comparison.
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You commented a 3 weeks old post, and I don’t understand what you’re saying.
And what’s new with this update?
New Features:
- Your Daily Mixes
- Improved search interface with predictive auto-complete
- All-new TIDAL experience
- Support for back / forward gesture on iOS
- Added support for Thai localization (beta)
Changes and bug fixes:
- Improved application memory management on Windows and Roon OS
- Updated Dropbox API
- Added Bootleg section to “From My Library” on Artist Overview
- Scroll position fixes:
- Scroll position is properly restored when navigating back to Albums, Artists and Composers browsers, including cases with active focus bookmarks
- Resolved issue where clicking “Focus” wouldn’t scroll browser to the top on Android
- Resolved issue where clicking “Focus” wouldn’t scroll Composition details to the top
- Fixed case where picking focus criterion on browser’s page would scroll to the top
- Home: Scroll positioning is properly saved for View All pages
- iOS:
- Fixed a bug where duplicated network interfaces on iOS could trigger Roon crash
- Fixed iPad layout to ensure seeking doesn’t interact with iOS home bar
- New iOS Settings for troubleshooting (iOS Home → Settings → Roon)
- Added ability to wipe Roon Remote data
- Added ability to locally save Roon Remote logs
- Fixed playback failures for local tracks accented chars in file path
- Resolved startup hang due to file corruption
- Improved calculation of CoreAudio and WASAPI buffers to prevent audio samples from being cut off at start of playback.
- Fixed crash when clicking in Signal Path for Roon Ready USB Bridge
- Resolved missing options when selecting a TIDAL or Qobuz playlist
- Fixed spurious “Limiting Radio To Library” messages
- Fixed layout of ‘In Their Prime’ header at certain screen sizes
- Album Details: Fixed case duplicated ‘Live / Bootleg/ Compilation’ text when album doesn’t have a review
- Android: Fixed bug preventing volume control for local zone when Now Playing is open
- Resolved UI issues on Onboarding screens
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Couldn’t care less about Tidal and its politically biased “featured” recommendations - just cancelled my subscription with them. But the new dynamic search looks good.
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IDK, maybe Roon is stepping up it’s game a little because of the competition? I always say that competition is a good thing.
Do you think that Roon is feeling the heat from AS?
Maybe this competition will make them lower their subscription price. 
“Over the last year, we’ve doubled the Roon team to over 50 people across five continents, which allows us to be more ambitious in the scope and number of engineering projects running in parallel.”
It’s seems that Roon has ramped it up even before Studio was released.
When I tried Roon, I did it very seriously, and I took my time to check every detail of the application.
But the price was high, and I was not satisfied at all with the SQ that I was getting from Roon’s integration with HQPlayer. The sound was not as good as when HQPlayer played alone.
So for me, the subscription was not justified. But I tried it with an old version of Roon, not with 1.8.
You, as a Roon user, are you happy of what you get for the price you pay?