Excellent Gustard machine, with magnificent measured performance. Cheer ! But this device is clearly not for me!
When you are an exclusive classical music lover, which is my case, the use of a hifi streamer is pointless because impractical if you are demanding in terms of use.
I use Roon, Audirvana, Jriver, Itunes-Music, Foobar and WMP (installed on MAC for the first and on a PC for the last two), out of personal interest to see how these software evolve - I am a music critic by profession. I have a Mac mini and a Windows tower.
Roon is excellent software but all of its "pluses" are ineffective for me because its algorithms of listening proposals depending on what I listen to are mediocre and even absurd at times and its way of doing research on Qobuz is unreliable ( discs do not go up when they exist) and therefore forced to have the Qobuz player installed separately to make more reliable searches directly on this platform, Roon's metadata are sometimes curious and even erroneous: Roon changes titles by others...
In these conditions, using it from an Ipad or a mobile phone... is painful or even impossible in too many cases...
Audirvana, more modest in its pretensions, is less problematic although it also has aberrations because it has trouble correctly sorting the performers from the metadata written in the local files and its sorting in Qobuz has the same kind of problems as Roon: not all the disks searched go up... But it works in a standard way in UpNP if desired.
For local files only: Itunes and WMP are much more efficient than Roon and Audirvana: and nobody tells me about poorer sound quality... or moreover about qualitative differences between Roon, Audirvana, Jriver, Foobar, Itunes or WMP... On the other hand, tell me that Foobar has a disastrous ergonomics: yes absolutely agree. That Jriver has mediocre ergonomics: yes again.
For a user who listens to classical music, who has a very large collection of records ripped or purchased as local files, who subscribes to a streaming platform and uses it in concert, nothing will replace a small computer. NUC or Mac Mini type directly connected to a USB, HDMI or optical DAC, with a remote screen, a keyboard, a mouse... which does not prevent an application on a tablet or mobile phone. .. At least there, on a computer, he can install the software he wants and not depend on Roon integrated in third-party software leased to a hifi streamer, because Volumio and the others are really not made for classical music and subtle research... Roon who has nothing universal, far from it... and whose RAAT is still too much in the dependence he creates... facing UpNP or the direct connection of a mini computer on a DAC...
Which means that for half the price of this Gustard you can have a much more flexible, efficient and scalable solution... and just as qualitative by taking a mini computer and a DAC. And those who don't want a computer on all the time... still get one castrated with its most useful features when they choose a proprietary app-driven streamer...
