jhwalker

Same - DBpoweramp uses the AccurateRip database which confirms whether or not you've gotten an accurate rip, and it will re-rip a sector at a time if needed to get it right. And iTunes can sometimes read a damaged CD when even DBpoweramp cannot - irritating ;) but it's a good fallback to have.

My feelings on this lie somewhere in the middle, I think. I know exactly which reviewer you're quoting because I frequent his fora daily. And I think he offers incredible value in the services he offers. I think he oversteps a bit WRT his comments on the universality of the Harman Curve, BUT ... I also think the Harman Curve offers a "standard" we can (and should) reference as a baseline for comparisons. I don't think that any headphone that fails to precisely replicate Harman is automatically valueless, BUT I know I, personally, will not like it if if falls too far from from the curve, because Harman is also MY preference among all the variations I've tried. So, no, people who prefer something else are not necessarily fools (though they may be, or ignorant), BUT I question their judgment when they enthusiastically recommend headphones that are so far from accurate they MUST sound terrible (and they do, the ones I've listened to, at least). I think headphones which adhere closely to Harman as a baseline generally sound pretty good, and any specific variations may or may not contribute to the special value of that model.

... especially compared to some of her other albums, which are among my favorites. Disappointing.

Well, so is Spotify, and it hasn't seemed to hurt it's popularity ;)

Exactly. The only thing that has been updated even semi-regularly over at least the last year is the Bliss (metadata management) software, which I don't use 🤷‍♂️

Nah - my room is pretty decent already. I do use Audyssey (with the extra laptop software) for multichannel and Focus Fidelity for convolution in Roon just to even it out even more, but didn't really need to do much. Oh, and I bought a Klimt-themed sound-dampening room divider to break up reflections off my brick fireplace - works a treat.

90% speakers. 9% other electronics (e.g., receiver, streamers, etc.). 1% "other" (including cables). If a cable follows standard, it will work properly. I will pay a bit extra for what I consider "solid" construction, but not for any special features / 'tech'.

That's a very reasonable price for such a full-featured system. Personally, I find touchscreen-style navigation a pain for my ~9,000 album collection with over 5,000 artists, which is why I stick with Roon and it's easy "search"-based navigation - I can type "Def Leppard" (or "Yuja Wang") and within a second have all their albums to-hand, no scrolling required, so if I were to use this system, it would be as a Roon-ready endpoint. But sounds like a great integrated solution for you!

Understood - I actually use a sonicTransporter i9 as my core / server, and it works great. I bought it instead of a Nucleus because it had better "horsepower" (at the time) for my large library and I like the fanless design (much like the Nucleus). If the Titan had been available at the time, I might have bought it instead for the form factor and (hopefully) adequate horsepower ;)

Where's the dissonance? Is there any claim that this server sounds "better"? I don't see it. The claim is that it is optimized to run Roon, and has high-powered CPU, fast SSD storage, etc. - nothing about sound.

Thank you for the heads-up! Just ordered :) Berliner Philharmoniker Kirill Petrenko Kirill Gerstein piano Sergei Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 in E minor, op. 27 The Isle of the Dead op. 29 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in C minor, op. 18 Symphonic Dances op. 45

I love a good DIY story! I'm not at ALL handy enough to do any of that myself, but cool to know that others are and see how it can be done :)

I disagree, obviously. If the server is sending the bits unaltered, there is no mechanism by which they could conceivably sound different. An Excel spreadsheet contains the exact same numbers whether stored on a NAS and retrieved via SMB or stored in the "cloud" and retrieved via HTTPS. The bits are the same; therefore, the content is the same - same applies for music files: there's nothing special about them. Again, if a specific software actually DOES sound different (or an endpoint handles that stream differently), that's a problem, not a feature. NOTE: this is NOT to say that Audirvana (say) or Amarra is NOT doing something internally that "sweetens" the sound in some way, which may be difficult to detect if outputting directly to a DAC (e.g., via USB, etc.). But if they're actually just sending the file to a renderer (e.g., via DLNA), then they WILL sound the same unless the renderer is mishandling the stream.

Roon doesn't have a "sound quality". It's just a server that sends bit-perfect streams to whatever endpoint you are using. If your endpoint somehow sounds different when rendering the same bit-perfect streams from different servers, that's a problem with the endpoint, not Roon (or any other server). Sounds like all they're talking about here is enabling Aurender to be an endpoint for Roon; i.e., to accept incoming, bit-perfect streams via Roon's RAAT (again, bit-perfect) protocol 🤷‍♂️

No "procedure", per se, just tag your files when you import them. For example, when I purchase files from download sites, I run them through MP3Tag to make sure the tags (including Genre) are as I want them. When I import them into Roon, I have the setting "Settings | Import Settings | Use Genres extracted from file tags" turned on. You also have the ability to map "your" Genres to something else for display in Roon, but I don't bother with that - so long as Roon is recognizing the tags I've embedded in my files, I'm good.