Interesting that nearly all individuals that did the head-to-head shootout between the Taiko Extreme and the Aurender N30SA at Suncoast Audio preferred the sound of the N30SA. However, there is one big item that favors the Taiko Extreme, it can use any software. With the recent improvement in sound quality of Roon 1.8, the Taiko Extreme/Roon combination remains a very attractive option, as the functionality of the Roon interface is second to none.
Ken
Actually, once I got familiar with the Aurender interface, I found it to be more "Roon-like" than it initially appears. There's functionality and features there that is not immediately obvious at first glance.
In software parlance, it's a little bit more "modal" than Roon in the sense you have one more step than Roon to play a track or album in that the music needs to be "loaded" in the to playback Queue to be played, but the playback Queue also has an advantage that you can add multiple albums or tracks that can be played one after the other in sequence.
I found that, as I generally listen to an album in it's entirety, if you just select "Replace Queue", it loads that album into the Queue and immediately starts playing it.
There are a couple of features that are nice in the Aurender Conductor software that I only discovered recently and that may not be obvious to users at first glance that make the experience more "Roon-like".
The first is if you simply touch on the icon for the album art at the upper left of the playback section here...
it brings up the album cover art with the track info and controls overlaid onto it.
And...if you touch at the lower right of the album, it brings up an icon with three lines on it that overlays all the tracks for the album or...all the albums in the Queue. Then you can control the playback of tracks in the Queue directly from that overlay on the album art. It's pretty darn cool.
So, all that being said, after using the Aurender Conductor software for 4-5 months and being a long-time Roon fan and user, I've come the conclusion that the only
practically significant* difference between Roon and the Aurender Conductor software is the Radio mode you can invoke on Roon.
*-practically significant is all that matters...in the REAL world.