Roon 1.8: Unparalleled for critical listening and music exploration

When I reviewed Roon at its launch, back in 2015, I called it “must-have software for hardcore music fans.” I stand by that characterization, although in retrospect I shouldn’t have restricted its appeal to the hardcore. Anyone who derives deep enjoyment from listening to music will reap tremendous benefits from this one-of-a-kind—albeit incredibly complex—software.

That said, if you don’t consider music essential to life, you’ll probably have difficulty justifying the cost of a Roon license and the relatively steep hardware requirements you’ll need to run it. In addition to the client software, which you’ll run on a smartphone, tablet, or personal computer, you’ll need to run server software (the Roon Core) on some other computer on your home network. Developer Roon Labs recommends that the server have a least an Intel Core i3 (Ivy Bridge architecture or later) CPU, and it strongly recommends installing the Roon database on an SSD.

That rules out a lot of the NAS boxes you might already be using to store your personal music collection, since those tend to run on Intel Celeron, Intel Atom, Marvell ARM cores, or lesser processors. That’s not to say you can’t run the Roon core on a NAS box; it just needs to be a higher-end model with a fast processor. QNAP in particular targets Roon users with some of its higher-end models, as does Synology.

The Roon Core doesn’t necessarily need to run on the same machine where you’re storing your