Case For Mosaic vs Roon

No one said that Roon sounds bad !
So the strange statement is to be found somewhere else…

You wrote « I don’t use Roon until now, but if it sounded better I would change my mind…« . I understood that From what you wrote that it was a statement that Roon was sounding bad compared to…
Probably misunderstanding even If arzojaan is going this way.

1st system was dCS Debussy + Network Bridge (now replaced by Bartok), AES/EBU Siltech Golden Ridge G5 and Canare 4UHD BNC 75Ohm as clock cable. Harmonix, Siltech power and IC cables, ATC 50 Active + ATC SCA2 preamp, NUC 7i5BNH, router and NAS.
Comparing Tidal and DLNA from NAS.

2nd system was Hegel HD30 + Network Bridge (replaced by Bartok), ATC 40 + Plinius Reference. NUC 7i5BNH with LPS and the router with LPS. Dedicated power line and all custom cable set. Comparing Tidal streaming.
For NB and for Bartok difference between Mosaic and Roon the same.

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My understanding is Mosaic does sound slightly better than Roon over RAAT. I think Audirvana over USB (with a good USB cable, good source) sounds better than Roon and I would suspect the same for Mosaic.

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I use both Roon and Mosaic but cant say that I hear much difference if any between them. I still prefer to use Roon as that makes my listening easier and the way they blend local and streaming is really good.
If Mosaic sounds better or not compared to Roon it has to be something that the stream goes directly to the render without the way through the Roon core and via RAAT to the renderer.
When I have the etherREGEN in place between my Roon ROCK NUC and dCS NWB perhaps I will do more critical listening to see if one is better than the other but right now I dont know if I will bother with that.

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@arzojaan So you were comparing in the first case tidal streaming through mosaic and Roon and Roon local streaming vs mosaic in local streaming.
In the second case it was tidal through Roon and mosaic.

Very clear and thanks to have shared your findings. I will try to have a deep dive into that but to be honest it is very difficult to me to come back to DLNA streaming mainly because of the remote : finding my way in mosaic/DLNA through folders sorting mindset is too difficult after Roon. If I need to use DLNA I prefer to use the Lumin application that is re-shaping the library with recent adds and navigation through covers. I suggested this kind of UI to dCS on Mosaic and according to me the lumin app is one of the best in the context of DLNA streaming.
Anyway there is solution for everybody and all usage.

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Yes, thanks for correction to English))

Yes, but folder view compensate it for use local library. Hate editing tags :slight_smile:

I’ll try return to ROON and test it more deeply but later, after final tuning my system with some сables, etherRegen, dedicated power line and new room… :slight_smile:

using Mosaic directly, it seems that ROON adds extra processing. Or NUC superfluous equipment in chain. Slightly, yes

Are you in first wave? :slight_smile:

Yes I will get one from the first batch :slight_smile:

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Very interesting experience)

Thanks. Good to see that we have options for all the habits :slight_smile:

Good to hear. From my side I mixed the time with Europe and arrived too late. Need to wait…January. Looking for your feedback.

Perhaps we should not derail this Mosaic thread with stuff about the etherREGEN. Fell free to start one about that… :slight_smile:

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Doubt this 1s possible but thought I’d ask the question…is there a way to port playlists from Roon to Mosaic?
Following the review comments within the Bartok review on the Audiophile Style site I have been investigating Mosaic with some more attention and find the general facility and sonics just great.
I am slowly aligning with the camp that maintain it sounds superior to Roon so would love to port some Roon playlists through if at all possible.

I too am wondering if I can get by with Mosaic which appears to work well, but has some buggy behavior (like laggy UI sometimes) and isolates my Qobuz vs Tidal library such that they’re not able to be searched as combined…

That said, does Roon offer useful searches such as the ability to search for music by high-resolution? For example in Qobuz, when you search you can use the word “hires” to search for better than 44.1/16 recording’s … does Roon have such features? Or does it only manage a library of music you’ve downloaded from Qobuz and Tidal in the first place?

I’ll see if I can answer this. Full disclosure: I am an early lifetime Roon subscriber and a big fan of the platform. I don’t know why anyone would use anything else. :wink:

The short answer is “yes.” The long answer is: “yes, but you might not figure out how entirely on your own.” Like a lot of Roon’s power, this feature can be difficult to find, and impossible on an iPhone. Roon’s primo interactive device is an iPad. Period. Full stop. First and foremost, Roon is a manger of your library—both your local library and anything from the net you’ve added to your library, including from Qobuz or Tidal. If you’ve tagged or labeled anything with a resolution indicator, you can of course search for the results of your own work. But Roon doesn’t replicate the search capabilities of either of those services. If you search “Diana Krall hires”, you won’t get anything (unless you used that label). Same for “Diana Krall DSD”, “Diana Krall 96”, “192”, etc. But when you search for “Diana Krall”, you’ll get a list of artists, albums, and songs with indicators as to the source (Library or Qobuz or Tidal), and—if you have set your Roon settings to show format information like so:

Then you’ll be able to also see the resolution of each album your search brings up. And this works fine on the iPhone as well:

And of course, Roon will give you all the info you want under the album detail. But that’s not quite what you want. What you want is “Focus,” and if you try to find it on your phone, well you won’t. Grab an iPad or laptop and do a search, pick a result and hit the Focus button where you will get scads of search options that are effective locally and online through Roon. Here are a couple of screen shots from my iPad:

Once you know how to do this, it’s a piece of cake. You can save your Focus choices as well. It’s pretty powerful. Like I said, while there are a couple of specific use cases where the combo of Minim and Mosaic is very useful, I don’t know why the vast majority of users would not choose Roon.

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Mosaic is way faster on IPhone…sometimes I first play music with Mosaic…and then I have plenty of time for searching music on Roon :slight_smile: And when my NAS reboots or uograde its firmware…Mosaic…

Not if you’re not running MinimServer. That to me is the whole point. I’ve done Minim. Not going back. Can’t imagine why I would want to run both (though I did briefly when I dropped Minim/UPnP like a hot rock and decided to be a lifetime Roon subscriber). And have you run Roon on a Nucleus+ with all the music stored on the internal SSD? I guarantee you Minim/Mosaic is not any faster in that circumstance, and likely a bit slower.

I still use Mosaic for component interaction, of course, and occasionally even just to switch music tracks (which it will do while Roon is working). But I don’t really enjoy Mosaic’s interface, and it’s pretty impoverished compared to Roon’s “meta system.” That’s not a criticism; it’s just my observation of a Roon advantage.

To each their own! :smiley:

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I use both application with pleasure, and it is obvious that Roon development team must be larger than the Mosaic team, but…I like diversity (in that case it is not to be politicly correct :slight_smile: ) and competition. The users, us actually, shall benefit from that. It is also a risk mitigation for us…Imagine that Roon goes bankruptcy and that dCS stopped their development effort with Mosaic because 90% of their customers prefer Roon…Aië !! comme on dirait en France :slight_smile:

For these reasons, I shall always support Mosaic development and by the way, I do hope we will get an update before the end of the year …We got recently an upgrade from Roon (at least on Qnap)…so dCS needs to catch up :wink:

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