Multiroom System of the Year
Our Multiroom System Award has previously gone to platforms which are primarily hardware-based, or at least purchased as part of a device — think Yamaha’s MusicCast, or Bluesound, or HEOS, or Sonos. Last year we gave it to Chromecast, which had snuck up on everyone by stealth and created a multiroom audio system in many homes without people even realising it was there.
That won’t happen with Roon, because it’s software, for which you have to subscribe at $119 per year, or a lifetime purchase of $499. And in this day and age, many people don’t see the value inherent in software.
But Roon is remarkable in three key ways. Firstly it combines all your own music, wherever you might store it, in iTunes or Windows or on a NAS drive in the attic, and it rolls all this together in an intelligent and attractive interface. It learns about your collection and suggests interesting ways to navigate it, like all the different albums on which a particular session drummer might play, or shuffling everything from a quirky independent record label. It’s easy to move around your collection via connections you’d never previously noticed. It can also combine your collection with Tidal to deliver everything in the world under this interface, though that’s an additional subscription, and it’s important to emphasise that Roon works perfectly well without Tidal.
Secondly, it uses your home network to deliver all this music to devices throughout your home. If you’re using your computer this could be an attached DAC. It could be any device which is defined as ‘Roon ready’. But more recently Roon has been able to address any iOS device, anything that has AirPlay, Sonos devices, and most recently of all, anything with a Chromecast in it. That’s loads of possibilities!
And thirdly but certainly not leastly, it is a stickler for audio quality — it’s baked into its core, as it were. Touch the coloured dot on its interface and it shows you exactly what is happening to the file from its source through to its final destination. Is your AirPlay device down-ressing high-res? Are you getting a real double-unfold of MQA from Tidal through your DAC? Roon tells you.
We must declare that Roon has given us a licence; we haven’t had to stump up the money for Roon. But if they took it away again, we’d have no hesitation in paying for it. Like any software, it occasionally slows up with your system. But there is no better way to control your music, to ensure the best possible quality of delivery to multiple devices, or to enjoy the sheer wonder of musical discovery. More info: roonlabs.com
“Roon has become a peacemaker between hardware platforms. There is no better way to control your music, to ensure the best possible quality of delivery to multiple devices, or to enjoy the sheer wonder of musical discovery.”