Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Home Live stream review – ROON – Audirvana – Foobar – JRiver

Live stream review – ROON – Audirvana – Foobar – JRiver

Door
Jaap Veenstra
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7
Review
Specs

Conclusion Video and samples

Contents

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Check out the live stream

Conclusion

What a wonderful live test of audio software applications. We all learned a lot! The four applications we auditioned all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Foobar is free and sounds good. However, it remains a bit of a hassle for the not-so-tech-savvy user. Audirvana was today's favourite. It sounds great, but if you want streaming, you will need a subscription (Studio). Roon is unprecedentedly pleasant to use, supports almost all streamers, but is pricey. And we liked the Audirvana sound more than Roon.JRiver has its own nifty ASIO driver and numerous options for tweaking. Nice, but not for everyone. You buy the software for 80 Euro and can upgrade to subsequent versions for a favorable additional cost. A friendly model, though. Which one is the best? That's a matter of taste. We found Audirvana to sound the nicest. And Roon remains the most user-friendly. It is the software package that should fit. Try before you buy!
Type test
Multitest
Production country
Different
Sound Samples
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Features
  Windows Media Player
  • Build: not relevant
  • Sound: Harsh, flat, cool
  • Imaging: Flat
  • Overall: Not very refined. Dull and flat sound
  Foobar
  • Build: not relevant
  • Sound: Fast pace, complete, detailed
  • Imaging: Large enough, good focus
  • Overall: Much better than WMP!
  Audirvana
  • Build: not relevant
  • Sound: Very fluid and refined. Detailed, yet not analytical.
  • Imaging: Very large and airy.
  • Overall: Amazing sounding package. Very complete, organic and nice sound
  • Price: From 7 euro / month
  JRiver
  • Build: not relevant
  • Sound: Very detailed and airy. 'Hifi' sound.
  • Imaging: Large, tight focus
  • Overall: Feels very 'hifi'-like
  • Price: 80 Euro
  Roon
  • Build: not relevant
  • Sound: Detail rich, mild sound
  • Imaging: large, precise, more 'podium feel'.
  • Overall: Very nice, bit soft, very user friendly!
  • Price: From 10 euro / month

7 COMMENTS

  1. Hi,
    nice review/test, thank you!
    to see Roon working at its best you could use the ROCK package installed in a dedicated NUC… it seems that WIN10 could not the best friend of good sound when Roon is the player… your collegue/friend Hans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNfUo0Zqz3Q at min 12:51) didin’t find any different at all between Audirvana and Roon… so ok, probably WIN10 is quite good for email and office 😉
    anyway, thank you very much… a channel with very interesting content indeed

    • We tested all packages on the same computer in the same way. We also have ROON bridge installed on a Win10 machine (our own AudioPC) and that sounds very, very good. Roon Rock on a NUC without the dedicated USB-filters, ethernet cards does not work that well, is our opinion. The OS of course has an impact. But you need some specific Linux distribution to make it better than Windows. Ubuntu, for example, doesn’t sound good at all. But some small distri could sound amazing.

    • Hello Luciano,

      Audirvana is a piece of software that works like a UPnP server and has its own UPnP controller interfase: the Audirvana Remote App, which controls the Audirvana server exclusively, next to the interface on Mac and Windows.

      JPlay is an app that acts like a UPnP server and a UPnP controller as well.

      Both apps stream to a UPnP renderer. A UPnP renderer is a streamer. So, JPlay cannot control Audirvana.

Alpha Audio - Haarlem - Netherlands

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