When I started collecting recorded music in the mid 1970’s we bought records. 7 and 12 inch plastic disks with squiggly grooves that contained the music. They took up a lot of space and were heavy to move around but, if handled carefully, kept clean, and played on a decent turntable, they sounded pretty good. For portability we had the compact cassette that we just called cassette. We had tape recorder/players called tape decks that we used to dub our records onto cassettes to play them in portable players and, more importantly, in the awesome sound systems we installed in our cars. At least we thought they were awesome. The car radios of the time were pathetic and we young music lovers scrapped them and installed our own as soon as we could afford to.
Then in 1982 the Sony/Philips compact disk was introduced. At first the players were expensive, around $2,000 in 2020 dollars and they sounded pretty awful. A combination of indifferent mastering and immature playback technology meant they didn’t sound as good as a decent vinyl rig so I waited. Prices came down quickly and people rushed out to buy them. Because they were a digital means of storage, background noise was only very low level electronic noise, inaudible at normal listening levels, while vinyl, at it’s best, still had that audible groove rush. People loved the lack of noise and most people had miserable quality turntables so the CD player did sound better. As people rushed to CD, turntables went on sale so I bought a better turntable. A few years later, the major studios stopped releasing new music on vinyl and I bought a CD player. I never really loved the way they sounded until the late 1990’s when I finally heard one I liked as well as my turntable. During this time I had continued to purchase music I liked on the new medium.
The year 2000 brought us the MP3 lossy codec and its ability to squeeze digital audio files into containers small enough to download through our pitifully slow internet connections. For you less techie types, a codec is shorthand for encoder/decoder, in this case a means of shrinking and subsequently expanding a digital file. Lossy means that once you encode the file you can never get back the full original content. Something gets irrevocably lost. To many listeners, that something has audible consequences. MP3 files can sound good but not the same as the original file. CD sales started to go down. Much of the world was trading pirated MP3 copies of songs on the internet. A few years later Apple opened the Itunes store and made it easy to purchase compressed music files at the push of a virtual button.
During this time a startup company called Slim Devices began selling a music streamer called a Squeezebox with software to run on your computer to stream to it. They got purchased by Logitech and the hardware and software improved. We could now rip our CD’s onto our computer hard drives and play them into our stereo systems with full resolution at the push of a button.
By 2008 the Squeezebox had been through several generations and was getting good reviews in the audio press. I bought the then top model, seen on the left. The Squeezebox Duet came with it’s own rechargeable dedicated controller and could connect to your network via WiFi or wired ethernet. By this time, I probably owned around 500 CD’s and 400 vinyl records. I began ripping every new CD I bought onto my hard drive and playing them through my new streamer. I began a project to rip my CD collection into my computer. After a few months I was done. I still have a CD player but it’s mostly for guest use. I use it once in a while just for fun but it simply isn’t necessary. Several web sites sprung up that sell CD quality digital file downloads so my CD purchasing started to lessen. The sites don’t have everything so I continued and continue to occasionally buy, them, rip them, and store them in a closet.
As the years went by, I bought two more new versions of the Squeezebox to feed sound systems in other rooms. I still have one feeding a vintage mono system and my original Duet is in the garage in a box. If I charge up the controller it probably all still works.
Audio companies began including streaming capability in their preamps, integrated amps and receivers, using a protocol called UPnP, universal plug and play, which was neither but close, making the Squeezebox’s closed ecosystem a bit obsolete. An enterprising software engineer wrote a bit of code that would make your UPnP devices look like Squeezeboxes to Logitech Media Server and I used this for a while. The handwriting was on the wall and in 2012 Logitech dropped the line. The server software is still somewhat supported and the web server that allows you to link your streaming services to your Squeezebox still works as far as I know, but it was time for another solution.
The first one I tried was JRiver Media Center. It is an all purpose streaming server that can do audio and video. It’s not free but it is cheap and works pretty well. It streamed to all my gear except the Squeezebox, unless I did some clunky work-arounds. JRMC offered a solution in the form of a Raspberry Pi based streamer. It was packaged and programmed and cost under $100. I got one. It worked well but it had its problems. It would hang and need rebooted. Once after a power outage, it stopped working completely and I had to get a new software card from JRiver because they refused to send me a software image.
I started looking for something else. For several years, I had been reading glowing reviews of a dedicated music database application called Roon. (www.roonlabs.com) It isn’t cheap, It’s a $10/month subscription or a one time fee of $699 for a lifetime license. If you don’t have a sizeable digital music collection, it’s impossible to justify. There is a free two week trial. I downloaded the software, installed it on my PC, pointed it at my music hard drive and it quickly catalogued my collection. Then it scanned my network and listed all the devices it could connect to. Everything.
I got some free Roon player software for my Raspberry Pi along with an add on board to send a SPDIF stream to my DAC (A digital to analog converter changes a digital data stream into a signal any amplifier will play)
Roon has some neat features. It displays all your albums and artists and makes it easy to pick something to play. It connects to an on line database with information about the music you’re playing. Guest artists, composers, other albums by the artist, other groups the artist participated in, biography, etc. Many of these are hot links so you can jump to other albums the lead guitar player was on, other artists that covered the same song. Lot’s of fun stuff. The other fun thing is that Roon will connect to two of the high resolution music streaming services. Tidal and Qobuz. You have to subscribe of course. As much as I despise rap music and disrespect it’s creators, Tidal offered me a 30% discount on their high resolution service because I am a veteran, so I signed up for $12/month. Linking Tidal to Roon makes the entire Tidal music collection available to click on and add to a virtual library that looks like it is the same as my actual library. Listen to it, like it, click. Listen to an old jazz standard, see that Tidal has 150 different versions. Scroll through the list. Hmm, who is that? Listen, click. I can go down a rabbit hole of music exploration for hours.
When your current selection of music ends, Roon Radio takes over and starts playing music from your collection and your streaming service that it thinks is similar. I remember one time I stumped it. I had just played “When the Levee Breaks” by Vanessa Fernandez and when the last song ended the music stopped. I thought I must have turned the radio function off, so I looked. There was a message on my Ipad, “nothing similar to play”. I smiled. A hip hop/pop/jazz singer from Singapore doing mostly acoustic covers of LED Zeppelin songs. I guess not.
Roon supports most streaming formats and has extensive built in digital signal processing (DSP) that lets you change formats or apply full parametric EQ to the stream. All settings are unique to the device you stream to, so if you have music players in different rooms, Roon can stream different formats and different equalization. It can stream to multiple players simultaneously, sending different content, or synchronized so the same music is playing everywhere. After 14 days of playing with it, there was no way I wasn’t going to sign up for a paid subscription.
After using Roon for a bit more than a year with the server running as a background app on my PC, I decide to free up its resources and run a dedicated Roon server. You can spend quite a bit of money on a fanless PC to run this in your music room but I just bought a decent spec used computer from the Amazon marketplace for $180 and put it in another room. Roon doesn’t require tons of CPU power, just a small solid state drive to make the database functions snappy and another drive big enough to hold your music.
I still have my vinyl collection and still occasionally spend an evening going through the cleaning, playing, flipping over, ritual of listening to LP’s. They can sound wonderful although even the best have noise that digital music just doesn’t. Most of the time, though, I am scrolling through Roon on my Ipad looking for what to play. If you are a music lover with a good sized digital music collection and you don’t want to spend another $10 to $30/month on your listening pleasure, I recommend that you do not try the 14 day free trial of Roon. Once you’ve used it, you won’t want to go back
Additional information. If you don’t know what a Raspberry Pi is, it’s a small single board computer pictured bottom right. It can run a variety of operating systems but most people use a form of Linux. It has a set of interface pins sticking up that allow you to attach a HAT (hardware attached on top). There is a cottage industry of HAT’s for all sorts of purposes and all kinds of free software. To use one, you need the board for $35, a power supply for $15 and a case. Cases run from $5 and up. The metal one below is $25. The HAT pictured below is from a company called HiFiBerry that also provides free software to run their devices on an RPi. The only thing else you need is a microSD card and a freeware tool for writing a bootable image on it. My HiFiBerry software on my Rpi has been running for over a year without a glitch. If you are a computer savvy hobbyist you can have a music streamer up and running for around $100 that works as well as anything else you can buy. Of course, you need a music system to connect it to. If you have an AVR, stereo receiver, or something else with a built in streamer, you don’t need this at all. One of my systems is a traditional, preamp, amp, speakers, stereo system and this is used as the digital source.
