Mosaic-GUI < > Roon

I really love my Rossini- for me the best source I ever had. I use roon (external server) + Melco to do the file duties.
So here is the problem…the roon GUI is great but the SQ compared to upnp/Mosaic directly is more “muddy” (backround noise?). Even my dealer confirmed, that roon “adds” something and that many of his customer don’t like that.
I use for “critical” listening the Mosaic app. My question- will there be an update for this?
Even Innuos will bring out a fantastic looking GUI for their server line.
Thanks!
Ralf

dCS say this about Roon vs. Mosaic:

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There have been several threads here over time regarding the sound of Roon v, Mosaic. You may be interested in reading one of the more recent:

As far as I am aware dCS have never intended Mosaic to be an all singing, all dancing player. It is supposed to be a basic player that will suit the majority of users. The kind of curation that Roon provides would not be economically feasible with a free to user player like Mosaic. Of course the strategy at dCS may change but I see no imminent move to Mosaic being much more than it currently is. After all we are still awaiting the release of v.1.1.2 which is only intended to fix some of the outstanding issues and not to add anything new.

So, for now, if you want a Roon type GUI then the place to find it is …Roon

Thanks- but I do not agree here:-) SQ difference is audible…

thanks Pete,
bad- I would love to have a better GUI…

I disagree.

I don’t automatically disbelieve anyone who says they hear a difference between playback of bit-perfect streams, where the sole difference—i.e., all other things being equal—is the server software between the two streams. But I sure would like to hear someone offer a credible explanation as to why. That I have yet to hear.

I find it quite amusing that dCS explains there’s no difference based on how the platform is built, and yet some audiophiles insist there’s a difference. The only logical reason for a difference is a physiological one, and the power of the brain for cause and effect, I wasn’t immune either :grin:

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My dealer sells Innuos, Melco, Nucleus and Aurender. He told me that he and many of his customers hear differences btw. sources. And many don‘t use roon because of its SQ.
But that was not my point- I just asked when/if Mosaic will improve the GUI :grinning:.

In my view this is a fundamental question of what a company is focused on. A company’s “core business” is what it does much better than anyone else, because it has focused on this core business for many years. Much like an athlete and his core discipline. You cannot win if you do everything.
dCS’s core business has been sound quality and longevity all along and that is where they excel.
Roon’s core business is the flashy graphical user interface and the ability to stream music to a wide variety of devices without burdening the user with the complexity of interfacing.
So my approach is to use each for what it does best. I would frankly hate to see dCS spend significant effort on trying to rival Roon (or anyone else) in the area of GUI. Nor would I expect Roon to achieve the same SQ as dCS.

Profit is usually an excellent motivator for hearing a difference, I’m sure he does actually hear a difference. On days I do well in the market, my system sounds like a million bucks :rofl:

ok, now I will shock you: I can even hear the difference btw roon and mosaic playing mp3 radio stream
:slight_smile:

How about this for a “shocker” then;

If there’s nothing wrong with your system, the bitstream that goes into digital-to-analog conversion, regardless of whether it streamed via Roon/RAAT or via Mosaic/UPnP, are measurably identical to each other, and to the original .wav file if your source is a local file.

Measurably identical, all 3. :smile:

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maybe we measure the wrong thing then?

If you have two file on your PC, and they compare identically bit-for-bit. Do you think it’s being “measured” wrongly? :grin:

No, they are identically, no question! Maybe it’s the transport btw. roon and dCS- I don’t know! Maybe roon “stress” something- I don’t know! In my chain it has a 100% SQ difference.
Guess it’s the old discussion here: audible/hearing vs measurement. Peter Q from Audio Note said he doesn’t care about measurements. Audio Note’s CD player and transporter sound great and they don’t have best measurements.
I leave it that way…thanks!

I don’t disbelieve people, but I would just like to hear a reasonable hypothesis why. No one has proffered one yet.

Sorry Rudi, that’s not an apt comparison. Roon’s software and dCS’s hardware perform two very different functions. There is nothing mutually exclusive nor even directly comparable about their respective roles. That’s true of any software serving a dCS DAC. dCS SQ and [any server] SQ are not comparable reference points. Further I think you’ve conflated Roon’s very good UI with some sort of assumption that it cannot perform its core task well. I am sure that would be news to a host of companies in a lot of industries. Roon’s expertise does include delivering bit-perfect files. Just as much, if not more so, than any UPnP package. What gives you any reason to think Roon’s SQ is worse or better than UPnP?

So, which software delivery package would you expect “to achieve the same SQ as dCS”? Who has the core expertise to deliver SQ as well as dCS? And how would one define that SQ other than bit-perfect? And what does this tell you about dCS itself, which says that the software simply needs to deliver bit-perfect files and that the DAC takes care of the rest? Anup is right to be amused: you exalt the dCS sound, but then implicitly say they don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to Ethernet delivery of bit-perfect files. :confused:

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What I was trying to say apparently did not come across as intended (non native speaker here).
I was responding to @T38.45 's original request that dCS should improve the GUI of Mosaic. My comparison was referring to Mosaic vs. Roon as ways to interface with dCS hardware.
Should dCS all of a sudden decide to build a GUI on top of Mosaic to rival Roon, I would be deeply worried. That would be a waste of development resources.

Just to reiterate on the two things I find Roon does well (besides many things they don’t do well at all and don’t seem willing to fix):

  • They make it easy for me to stream to any Roon Ready device, be this a Google Chromecast, a RP based HifiBerry Endpoint, a dCS Rossini, a Chord 2go/Hugo. I don’t have to worry about where these devices sit and what their capabilities are, it just works (well, most of the time). That’s a huge plus vs. UPnP, which struggles with i.e. gapless, let alone metadata.

  • They make it (fairly) easy to surf through my collection of music and find other music by the same artist

So for me, Roon is ideal for casual listening.
But for critical listening I will always go with Mosaic.
And by they way for listening to multichannel ISOs there’s only jRiver.
So it’s horses for courses.

Same here Rudi expect jRiver…

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