terryforsythe
Major Contributor
I am trying out Tidal, thinking of dropping Spotify. Tidal's phone/tablet app is fine for playing Tidal using Airplay, Bluetooth or Chromecast audio. However, I want to access my locally stored music collection and Tidal using one application, and I want to stream via UPnP to my system. mconnect HD and Roon both provide those capabilities (and Roon also provides a lot more features).
My miniDSP SHD came with two months of Roon for free, so I thought I would give it a try. I am also trying out mconnect HD. The following information is useful for comparing mconnect HD and Roon:
PRICE:
mconnect HD:
$5.99 – one-time purchase per phone/tablet/computer on Apple App Store or Android Google Play Store.
(There is a free Lite version, but it displays advertisements. I don't know if it otherwise is the same – I didn't delve that far into it before switching to the paid version – the advertisements were just too annoying to me.)
Roon:
$12.99/month, $119.88/year or $699.99 one-time purchase
(There is a free trial available)
STREAM TYPES SUPPORTED – Both mconnect HD and Roon
Google Chromecast Audio
AirPlay/Bluetooth
UPnP (including MQA)
(There may be other's, but these are the main ones. None of my devices support MQA, so I don't know if there is a difference between how mconnect HD and Roon handle it.)
INSTALLATION
mconnect HD:
Install the app on your phone/tablet.
- If you want to run mconnect HD on a PC or Mac, you need an emulator to run it on a Windows 7-10 PC or Mac, or you need the Player Android App to run it on a Windows 11 PC.
Roon:
1. Install Roon Core Server on a computing device, e.g., a computer that is always on or a NAS; and
2. Install the Roon Remote on your phone/tablet and/or install the Roon desktop app on a Windows PC or Mac.
- I installed the Roon Core Server on my Synology DS718+ NAS (6 GB of RAM), which is where I store my ripped CDs. So far, the performance seems perfectly fine, but the installation was not seamless.
- For both mconnect HD and Roon, to stream music from a NAS, that feature must be enabled and configured in the NAS.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES
mconnect HD Advantages:
- Inexpensive (free if you don't mind advertisements)
- Does not require a core server that runs on a separate computing device.
- Runs well – I have not yet had any issues.
- It has detected all of my ripped CDs flawlessly.
- It rescans and refreshes my music collection list each time it connects to my NAS, and does so quickly. I am still in the process of ripping my CDs to my NAS, so this feature is nice for me.
mconnect HD Disadvantages:
- Requires an emulator or another app to run on a PC or Mac.
- Does not include a wealth of features that Roon provides. In my opinion, most notable is Roon's DSP capabilities.
Roon Advantages
- DSP - E.g., filters that provide the ability to apply room correction to the music stream, and for each audio system/zone; Headroom management; and Sample rate conversion. The filters can be generated using Room EQ Wizard (REW), which is available for free.
- Music recommendations.
- Daily music selections.
- Background information about the music and artists.
- Finds information about music that may be missing from the stored metadata. (E.g., I had a couple of CDs ripped to my NAS without cover artwork, and Roon automatically found the artwork and displayed it).
- And there are more features, I just have not yet delved more deeply into it.
Roon Disadvantages
- Very expensive in comparison to mconnect HD.
- You need to run the Roon Core Server on a computing device (e.g., a NAS, a PC or a Raspberry Pi), and that computing device probably should be left on to avoid having to wait for it to boot up every time you want to use Roon to listen to music. If you need to buy a computer to run Roon Core Server, that adds to the cost. If, however, you already have a NAS or spare computing laying around with sufficient power to run Roon, it may be a non-issue.
(My Synology DS718+ has an Intel Celeron J34554 quad core processor - 1.5 GHz/2.3 GHz burst, and is upgraded to 6 GB of RAM, and so far it seems to be running Roon Core Server perfectly fine. However, I am not using Roon for its DSP capabilities. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that a more powerful processor would be necessary for smooth playback if using the DSP.)
- Getting the Roon Core Server setup on some NAS's is not so straight forward. My NAS, running DMS vers. 7.1, would not let me install the first two versions of Roon Core Server I tried. I ended up installing Docker on the NAS and installing a Roon Core Server image somebody had created and made publicly available.
- Roon sometimes shows individual tracks of a ripped CD as separate CDs. This typically occurs on CDs that list different artists for different tracks, e.g., compilation CDs and some classical CDs. Roon does have a feature to allow you to manually select the different tracks and merge them into a single CD, but there have been a couple of times where the tracks were widely dispersed throughout my CD collection, and so I had to search for them. This issue has not happened to me in mconnect HD.
- The Roon Core Server re-scans the locally stored music collection on a schedule, which is set to 4 hours by default. If you want to detect newly added music between re-scans, you need to manually initiate a re-scan.
- The Roon re-scan does not detect music removed from the stored collection. If a CD is removed, it still shows up in Roon, unplayable, until the Roon Core Server is restarted. For me, that means logging into my NAS and restarting the Docker image.
SUMMARY
mconnect HD, at $5.99, is a really good value if you want a single application to access your locally stored music collection and Tidal and/or Qobuz, or if you want to stream via UPnP. If you want it for free and don't mind advertisements, try the mconnect Lite version.
Roon is expensive. Its DSP capabilities really take it to the next level, though. The information Roon provides about music/artists, and customized music recommendations, also are nice.
My miniDSP SHD on my main system has Dirac Live, and my Yamaha receiver in my game room also has built-in room correction. So, I likely will not be using Roon for DSP. Roon's other features, though nice, to me are not worth Roon's price. So, unless I discover some other really neat features in Roon that are valuable to me, at the end of my free trial period I may drop Roon and exclusively use mconnect HD.
My miniDSP SHD came with two months of Roon for free, so I thought I would give it a try. I am also trying out mconnect HD. The following information is useful for comparing mconnect HD and Roon:
PRICE:
mconnect HD:
$5.99 – one-time purchase per phone/tablet/computer on Apple App Store or Android Google Play Store.
(There is a free Lite version, but it displays advertisements. I don't know if it otherwise is the same – I didn't delve that far into it before switching to the paid version – the advertisements were just too annoying to me.)
Roon:
$12.99/month, $119.88/year or $699.99 one-time purchase
(There is a free trial available)
STREAM TYPES SUPPORTED – Both mconnect HD and Roon
Google Chromecast Audio
AirPlay/Bluetooth
UPnP (including MQA)
(There may be other's, but these are the main ones. None of my devices support MQA, so I don't know if there is a difference between how mconnect HD and Roon handle it.)
INSTALLATION
mconnect HD:
Install the app on your phone/tablet.
- If you want to run mconnect HD on a PC or Mac, you need an emulator to run it on a Windows 7-10 PC or Mac, or you need the Player Android App to run it on a Windows 11 PC.
Roon:
1. Install Roon Core Server on a computing device, e.g., a computer that is always on or a NAS; and
2. Install the Roon Remote on your phone/tablet and/or install the Roon desktop app on a Windows PC or Mac.
- I installed the Roon Core Server on my Synology DS718+ NAS (6 GB of RAM), which is where I store my ripped CDs. So far, the performance seems perfectly fine, but the installation was not seamless.
- For both mconnect HD and Roon, to stream music from a NAS, that feature must be enabled and configured in the NAS.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES
mconnect HD Advantages:
- Inexpensive (free if you don't mind advertisements)
- Does not require a core server that runs on a separate computing device.
- Runs well – I have not yet had any issues.
- It has detected all of my ripped CDs flawlessly.
- It rescans and refreshes my music collection list each time it connects to my NAS, and does so quickly. I am still in the process of ripping my CDs to my NAS, so this feature is nice for me.
mconnect HD Disadvantages:
- Requires an emulator or another app to run on a PC or Mac.
- Does not include a wealth of features that Roon provides. In my opinion, most notable is Roon's DSP capabilities.
Roon Advantages
- DSP - E.g., filters that provide the ability to apply room correction to the music stream, and for each audio system/zone; Headroom management; and Sample rate conversion. The filters can be generated using Room EQ Wizard (REW), which is available for free.
- Music recommendations.
- Daily music selections.
- Background information about the music and artists.
- Finds information about music that may be missing from the stored metadata. (E.g., I had a couple of CDs ripped to my NAS without cover artwork, and Roon automatically found the artwork and displayed it).
- And there are more features, I just have not yet delved more deeply into it.
Roon Disadvantages
- Very expensive in comparison to mconnect HD.
- You need to run the Roon Core Server on a computing device (e.g., a NAS, a PC or a Raspberry Pi), and that computing device probably should be left on to avoid having to wait for it to boot up every time you want to use Roon to listen to music. If you need to buy a computer to run Roon Core Server, that adds to the cost. If, however, you already have a NAS or spare computing laying around with sufficient power to run Roon, it may be a non-issue.
(My Synology DS718+ has an Intel Celeron J34554 quad core processor - 1.5 GHz/2.3 GHz burst, and is upgraded to 6 GB of RAM, and so far it seems to be running Roon Core Server perfectly fine. However, I am not using Roon for its DSP capabilities. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that a more powerful processor would be necessary for smooth playback if using the DSP.)
- Getting the Roon Core Server setup on some NAS's is not so straight forward. My NAS, running DMS vers. 7.1, would not let me install the first two versions of Roon Core Server I tried. I ended up installing Docker on the NAS and installing a Roon Core Server image somebody had created and made publicly available.
- Roon sometimes shows individual tracks of a ripped CD as separate CDs. This typically occurs on CDs that list different artists for different tracks, e.g., compilation CDs and some classical CDs. Roon does have a feature to allow you to manually select the different tracks and merge them into a single CD, but there have been a couple of times where the tracks were widely dispersed throughout my CD collection, and so I had to search for them. This issue has not happened to me in mconnect HD.
- The Roon Core Server re-scans the locally stored music collection on a schedule, which is set to 4 hours by default. If you want to detect newly added music between re-scans, you need to manually initiate a re-scan.
- The Roon re-scan does not detect music removed from the stored collection. If a CD is removed, it still shows up in Roon, unplayable, until the Roon Core Server is restarted. For me, that means logging into my NAS and restarting the Docker image.
SUMMARY
mconnect HD, at $5.99, is a really good value if you want a single application to access your locally stored music collection and Tidal and/or Qobuz, or if you want to stream via UPnP. If you want it for free and don't mind advertisements, try the mconnect Lite version.
Roon is expensive. Its DSP capabilities really take it to the next level, though. The information Roon provides about music/artists, and customized music recommendations, also are nice.
My miniDSP SHD on my main system has Dirac Live, and my Yamaha receiver in my game room also has built-in room correction. So, I likely will not be using Roon for DSP. Roon's other features, though nice, to me are not worth Roon's price. So, unless I discover some other really neat features in Roon that are valuable to me, at the end of my free trial period I may drop Roon and exclusively use mconnect HD.
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