Roon lifetime price increase to $699

I am not surprised at all by this. What I am surprised by is how long it took them to make this change. When I was helping EJ out for a little while a couple years ago, and setting him up to sell Roon products, they had expressed to me that they did not believe that the lifetime subscription would be offered going forward. They felt it was not viable for them as a company. The lifetime was for an influx of cash as a new company but the yearly sub was their long term goal. They felt early adopters could take advantage of it but eventually they would eliminate lifetime sub all together and new customers would only have the yearly option.
 
Oh thank Jesus. Even though I am not using it yet i thought i better get on the bandwagon before this happened. :yahoo1:
 
I see that Roon has a update...1.7. I'm in the process of updating the I7 trasnport now. When I decided to make streaming my main music format about eight or nine months ago I just purchased the lifetime subsription at that time. It nice knowing I'm locked in.
 
Darrel said:
Just noticed on Roon" Live Radio". Is this new or did I just never notice this before?
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This is what is says regarding the release or Live Radio.
We’re thrilled to launch our Live Radio directory, a collection of more than 1000 live radio stations, hand curated by the Roon community. Now you can browse stations by genre or quickly find your local stations.

As with all streaming content, live radio can be added to your library for easy access later. Remember, the directory is an actively maintained database; if you have questions, suggestions, or if there’s a station you can’t find, let them know in the Live Radio 24 category on our community site.
 
Roon 1.7 — introducing Valence

Roon Labs is proud to announce the largest project we’ve ever undertaken. After two years of focused design and engineering, we’re unveiling an entirely new technology we call Valence.

Valence is a system built on a massive new cloud database, which uses machine learning algorithms – designed with our passion for music – to model the many dimensions of relatedness more deeply than ever before. And because you use Roon to explore, collect, and listen to the music you love, Valence understands you like no other.

The secret ingredient is the Roon community; Valence learns from the musical tastes of over 100,000 expert listeners who use Roon.

The result is the ultimate music expert, which presents the world of music through a lens personalized just for you.


If you’ve used the hugely popular Roon Radio, you’ve seen an early example of Valence in action. In the same way that the meaning of “radio” was transformed in Roon 1.6, today you’ll see Valence transform your understanding of ideas like “new releases for you” and “suggested for you” in Roon 1.7.

Beyond Valence, there’s more to this update: we’ve brought the kind of experience you expect from Roon to the world of live radio, and Roon OS has received a massive performance boost. As always, feedback from the community has led to a number of other improvements as well.

We hope you enjoy finding your next music obsession!



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Mike said:
Here is why:


https://community.roonlabs.com/t/lifetime-price-increase-499-699/84339


I agree with them. Maybe it’s time to eliminate the lifetime all together as an option for new subscribers. Early adopters are rewarded.

People on the fence should jump in soon.


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Excellent explanation. Amazing that the company is this open and honest. They had told me two years ago that they were considering eliminating the lifetime subscription!
 
I wish they concentrated more on the audio quality than AI features. Even a simple Innous music server's native player (and other Linux players) beats Roon big time in sound quality. To me, Roon is excellent library manager with sota UI and that's about it. After 1.3 release couple of yrs back, their foremost goal has been mass adoption. I don't see an issue with their business model, its just they aren't interested anymore on audio quality which is the sad part.
 
I do not necessarily agree with this. I believe Roon is a top notch performer and rivals most any software out there. I do also know from personal experience that this is affected by and influenced by individual setup. For example a couple years ago I believe there were others that sounded ever so slightly better. Working with a Roon engineer to attempt to solve this on my system we determined that using Roon as a headless server without any interface installed on the server itself actually allowed Roon to perform better, and equal to any software I had ever tried.

However, if this is still a concern they have added built in interface to the single best sounding playback engine (in mine and thousands upon thousands others opinions) available anywhere. Roon added direct support and interface to HQPlayer. Therefore Roon and HQPlayer make a tremendous and in my view unbeatable package. The best control interface paired with the best playback engine!
 
It is not only my personal opinion but many many many Roon users that have dabbled into many other playback s/w....their are massive threads around this in AudiophileStyle and Roon forums. I have been fiddling with Roon since its inception and have played around with many other playback s/w (including HQP and I own its license as well but don't use it anymore) in different OS environment - Windows and Linux. I used to run HQP as the backend playback engine to Roon (running Rock) but not anymore. The SQ advantage of HQP is only applicable if one is up-sampling not otherwise. If you have a properly tuned server, you just don't need HQP to do native sample rate playback - their are many Linux players (Euphony Stylus or Squeezelite for example) will give a hard time to Roon when it comes to sound quality. Unless you have heard them in your system, Roon will continue to be the best and I don't doubt it :-) I guess my point is Roon is trying to be the jack of all trades but master of none....
 
I will take your word for it since I have never used Linux in a music playback system setup. I very much prefer DSD and up-sampling to DSD512. And yes, whatever resolution the files are originally in sound wonderful, but I personally prefer the sound quality of DSD. I could also find just as many Roon users who have expressed their preference for Roon sound quality and just as many with the same opinion of Roon and HQPlayer. I certainly do not need HQPlayer to do native sample rate playback and would probably not use it as such.

The one thing that I really like about Roon is that they are continually developing and improving. These improvements have been in both features and in sound quality performance. Compared to many other software packages Roon does considerably more continual development then the competition.
 
We’ve done multiple comparisons of software like Lumin with Lumin software and Lumin with Roon and Innous with Innous Software and Roon. We really didn’t hear a big difference when using a Nucleus Plus, Keces P8 and a $600 QNAP switch. I think other system backends COULD affect that sound. But the way ours is configured, we just don’t hear it.


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Not sure about the Lumin but I just haven't heard anyone saying Roon sounds the same as the Innous (Zenith mk2 SE) or some of the other Linux playback engine. Its always the opposite and has been my experience as well. You could get close with Roon Core/Bridge combo but still not at par with, say an LMS/Squeezelite combo running on the same h/w. Simple simple things, like RAM based playback can give a significant boost to sound (lot more air around instruments and vocals), has been requested to them for a long time and they keep ignoring it. The other players do sound better but their library management just sucks big time, their ui is arcane compared to Roon - as capable as Roon engineers are, they are leaving behind a lot of potential on their playback quality IMO.
 
Devg said:
Not sure about the Lumin but I just haven't heard anyone saying Roon sounds the same as the Innous (Zenith mk2 SE) or some of the other Linux playback engine. Its always the opposite and has been my experience as well. You could get close with Roon Core/Bridge combo but still not at par with, say an LMS/Squeezelite combo running on the same h/w. Simple simple things, like RAM based playback can give a significant boost to sound (lot more air around instruments and vocals), has been requested to them for a long time and they keep ignoring it. The other players do sound better but their library management just sucks big time, their ui is arcane compared to Roon - as capable as Roon engineers are, they are leaving behind a lot of potential on their playback quality IMO.
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I asked Steve Silberman when he was at Roon about this and he laughed and said was all audiophile nonsense. He said their interface has no impact on the sound. That’s why they NEVER said the Nucleus would improve the sound, only the user experience.

However, I think if Roon core is running on a noisy computer, it could indeed have an impact. But in our setting, we hear no differences.

If you want to know what I think SOUNDS the best, it’s still the Aurender. But almost all our DAC’s are Roon enabled, so people want Roon. I use Roon at home and LOVE it. Why? Well, if I’m streaming, I’m already in the “good enough” camp, so what’s one more thing? Pop in a CD and it will beat any redbook streaming no matter what Linux box you’re running. Put a record or a tape on and well...


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Mike said:
I asked Steve Silberman when he was at Roon about this and he laughed and said was all audiophile nonsense. He said their interface has no impact on the sound. That’s why they NEVER said the Nucleus would improve the sound, only the user experience.
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Yes, no audio company will accept that others can sound better and at a cheaper price. It's that simple. Its not nonsense Mike, this is something that you really need to dabble in order to realize. The Roon folks didn't believe in theory all these small little things can improve sound and they never will (these are all documented in Roon forums). One thing I learned all these years is theory just goes out the door when it comes to computer based audio.

Mike said:
However, I think if Roon core is running on a noisy computer, it could indeed have an impact. But in our setting, we hear no differences.
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No, these are not cheap noisy computers and laptops. They are much more than Nucleus+ (which is basically an i7 NUC) is ever capable of and powered by world class power supply, like PH SR7, etc.

Mike said:
If you want to know what I think SOUNDS the best, it’s still the Aurender. But almost all our DAC’s are Roon enabled, so people want Roon. I use Roon at home and LOVE it. Why? Well, if I’m streaming, I’m already in the “good enough” camp, so what’s one more thing?
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Yes, there is absolutely no question when it comes to convenience of Roon - they are still leading the pack. I still use Roon extensively to browse and do most of the listening.

Mike said:
Pop in a CD and it will beat any redbook streaming no matter what Linux box you’re running. Put a record or a tape on and well...


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Ahh, yes....this I agree but some says the exact opposite with CD and Digital steaming....:)
 
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