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Roon
As I detailed earlier this week on Connected and the July issue of the Monthly Log, I’ve recently rethought my home setup for listening to my personal music collection. I originally took my first steps into the audiophile world in 2018 with a Sony Walkman portable music player (the WM1A) and Sony’s MDR-Z1R closed-back headphones, and I felt like it was time for a bit of an upgrade to medium-tier equipment that would give me greater freedom, more options, and superior sound quality. As I explained on Connected, I now have a desktop DAC and headphone amplifier (the Matrix Audio Mini-i Pro 3), a new portable player (Astell & Kern’s Kann Alpha), and, for the first time in my life, a good pair of open-back headphones (the HiFiMan Arya). I loved doing research about these products over the past several months, and it’s a personal hobby that gives me a lot of joy and makes me appreciate my music even more. But there’s another thing my headphone amp and portable music player have in common: they’re both Roon-ready devices.
As I’ve been saying this on my podcasts and wrote about it in the Monthly Log, a good way to think about Roon if you’re not familiar with it is as Plex Media Server for music on steroids. Roon is described as the ultimate player for music fanatics, and that’s exactly what it is: you install Roon on a desktop computer that acts as a “core” (i.e. server) by pointing it to a folder containing your music files, then use the Roon app on any device to browse your music collection and listen to music with bit-perfect quality without any compression whatsoever. Roon is the definitive music listening experience for people who want to listen to their music collection with good equipment in lossless quality, but its advantages extend well beyond the quality of audio files alone. What makes Roon special, in fact, is how it finds advanced metadata for all songs in your library, allows you to discover information about artists and albums you wouldn’t have otherwise found on traditional music streaming services, and, most importantly, creates connections between songs and artists.