I am asking because when quickly toggling between Roonserver using phone remote and Audirvana studio, Roon server and AS sound identical when both are in wasapi. But then, yep, to me AS then takes off when kernel mode on.
Kernel Streaming has always been a headache. Perhaps Roon wished to avoid issues like this:
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The question is … which one sounds better, not which one looks prettier !!!
True, and if Audirvana didn’t sound that much better than Roon, I would have chose Roon for it’s UX and feature set, even if I didn’t need all of the features. It is a very mature software with regard to features and UI, but Audirvana just made the music sound better (to me).
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You are very right!! And there are a number of details in the reproduction, which I prefer to ignore, only for its musical quality! Take care that you enjoy your music !!!
I’ve had Roon for around three months now to be able to play music remotely to various audio systems around my house. It does a great job doing that. However, for the ultimate sound quality, I keep coming back to Audirvana Studio on my desktop speakers/headphones system. AS just sounds better to me.
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Agreed. I have subscriptions to both but in the end deleted Roon and will let the licence lapse when due for renewal. Prefer the sound quality of AS, much brighter and greater clarity with my KEF speakers and Focal headphones.
A lot of people prefer the Roon UI however for me it irritates, option in fonts is for default, large or very large, would be nice with a small and smallest as well. Not as flexible for sizing album art as Audirvana. Also hate how if you set Roon to dark mode the window bar at the top stays light grey…very amateurish. Also prefer the greater clarity on signal path in Audirvana and the ability to build smart playlists.
One area where Roon has a clear advantage is the RAAT transfer protocol which makes buying devices less troublesome. If it says Roon Ready it will work. UPnP in AS is an open standard with a large latitude for interpretation which make AS a bit hit and miss with hardware mostly due to the differing implementations of UPnP by the hardware vendors.
At the end of the day each to his own, but for me AS even with a few bugs and glitches wins over Roon for sound quality and a simpler UI which does not try to do too much.
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I decided to try Roon as they are offering a 3 month sub at $1. I gave up and cancelled when it started asking for pathways to my NAS and so on, on installation. Audirvana does this without me having to type out a path. If software can’t be simple to use, why bother? From what I see here it’s not as if the sound quality would be better. Indeed it would be inferior. So my question is why would you spend more money on a piece of software that takes up huge resources, requires special hardware, is difficult to set up, and has an air of sanctimony about it?
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I agree to the simplicity argument. Audirvana is simple to use, has the best sound for me with my equipement, looks great and most of the bugs has been corrected, for me is stable, even with my old laptop with only 4 GB RAM and W10 LTSC installed on an old SATA hdd connected to usb because his internal HDD died. And has a good price. Not the best but good, at least for the moment. I don’t want many players, one for audio and one for video are enough. Even if maybe I loose something in this way I don’t care. I prefer to focus on content.
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I’m using Jriver for my movie & series collection. Have all my media tagged so with Theater View I can browse through my stuff and play from there. With cover art and all 
VLC has been installed here for many years now as well. It’s free and plays just about everything.
For music. I’ve settled on AS permanently Roon is ok-ish in my book. I love the whole interface for looking for music, with all the background information. But it’s too expensive for my taste and it doesn’t support my Bluetooth monitors at all. Windows, macOS, and all other programs connect to them with no problems. Only Roon can’t seem to find them at all. Another issue I have is that I have to setup my Windows USB soundcard a lot again. As Roon seems to forget that I have set it as a zone output to play music to. AS doesn’t have this issue at all.
I have 2 subs on AS, one for each of my systems, and that’s just slightly more expensive compared to a single Roon license. Soundquality is excellent and the bugs I’ve encountered since launch have been mostly fixed. When at home AS plays constantly here, so imho it’s well worth the sub price.
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Not sure what the deal is with Audirvana. Not much competition on the market, these players are all about the GUI and ergonomics. Behind the scenes stuff is pretty much carved in stone and is host-OS dependent. No new inventions need to be created, its just a matter of putting together the right set of existing functionality and pretty much copying what people like in other players.
If you create an open-source back-end users will pretty much create all the plugins, hooks and extra functionality on their own. This is how Android got so big so fast…see Android Open Source Project (AOSP), this is what keeps LMS alive and thriving today and this is what Roon is taking advantage of as well.
People begged for years, literally for Audirvana to bring back Internet Radio…come on years. I really don’t know what the deal is…
So for your Audirvāna Studio is only Internet Radio?
Nope.
Just like my car is not only for carrying things, but not having a trunk is a show stopper.
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Trunk is overrated
Until you need somewhere to put the…well, lets just say they come in handy at times.
True. A hatchback just isn’t as good for those “Well…” type things. 
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There are serious reports from another forum that the new Roon build 882 is much improved sonically in comparison to previous builds.
Did someone compare SQ of Roon 882 to Audirvana?
Thanks
Matt
I was searching for that on the Roon forum, but couldn’t find a reference to a sonical improvement in B882. Where did you see those reports?
What I do see on the Roon forum right now is dozens of complaints about the new update (database corruption, Roon not functioning anymore, Search not working anymore etc. etc.). Even people asking for a roll back or their money back. It looks like there is lot’s of dissatisfaction and anger there at the moment. The grass is not allways greener on the other side
I have both Roon and Audirvana and did not have a chance to listen to sonical differences between Audirvana and B882 myself, because I am in the process of completely re-installing Roon because of, drum roll…, database problems… and Roon could not find my output devices anymore. Fingers crossed…
and the following posts
Matt
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Thanks Matt!
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