Roon, Meridian, and High-End Distributed Audio

Long time Meridian fanboy and owner here, I think their DSP speakers sound great and the preservation of the digital path until the last possible moment appeals to my inner nerd. Our gear is getting a bit old but still sounds great, a 568.2MM with DSP5500 mains, a DSP5000C, and DSP33 rears. For distributed audio we were early Sonos adopters and have five additional zones in our home, and use the Sonos to feed the Meridian system with lossless files on a NAS and also Tidal hi-res streaming. Works pretty well, though multiple remotes are involved, a MSR and an iPad. The Sonos zones are decent quality ceiling speakers, for non-critical/casual listening.

My wife and I are in the process of having a new home designed which we will then have built, so I have been doing some thinking about how we will handle audio in the new home. Which home will be a bit smaller so maybe fewer audio zones, so thinking to have higher quality speakers and more tightly integrated systems would be nice.

I think the reason we went Sonos instead of Sooloos was mainly that I don’t much care for expensive proprietary boxes that are little more than cheap computers, albeit with some good software. Sonos might have had the UI going a little bit earlier too.

Meridian ditching the proprietary Sooloos boxes, allowing the core to run on a QNAP, got me more excited about doing Meridian DSP in-walls for a few zones in the new home, so I got a MS200 to be able to play with that for a bit now. But Meridian has been slow to deliver on the QNAP core (though I saw it running in their NYC office a couple of months ago), and then I stumbled on Roon, developed by the Sooloos people, ready for prime time, not tied to any particular hardware, but plays nice with Meridian, I was sold. I didn’t even bother with the trial, I plonked down for a lifetime subscription.

I hooked the MS200 up to our 568 with a Reviver, loaded Roon server up on a quad-core i7 hackintosh we use as a HTPC, and it was pretty much off to the races, we have the server watching the music on the NAS and our Tidal account is linked up. The 568 does not power on/off with the Roon app, but volume control working fine. My wife and I are still getting used to the Roon app (actually we are still getting used to the Tidal app too), but my sense is that this is what we will be using in our new home, probably moving the server to a large touchscreen PC, seems like people are using Lenovos or HPs, 27″ might be a little big for living area, I am thinking a 24″.