I used Audirvana for years when I had a battery-powered Mac Mini feeding a USB Dac. I used screen sharing to run things, which is not ideal but worked adequately. When i finally figured out how to get a better signal path via Roon, I retired the Mac running Audirvana. The inescapable weakness of Audirvana is coupling the DAC to a general-purpose computer. You have to invest time and money in workarounds for all the noise in the source.
Audirvana Studio (AS) is now trying to copy Roon, but the mimickry is superficial and incomplete. Samsung was successful in knocking off the iPhone, but AS does not have a cost or global distribution advantage like Samsung did. There is no cost advantage because there is no lifetime option. Sure, AS is $6//mo billed annually compared to $10/mo. for Roon, but AS does not have Roon's one-time, lifetime option. Paying once for a lifetime of use is where the cost savings really comes. Even granting that the monthly cost is lower, AS offers significantly less than Roon.
1. No rich metadata: Roon transformed how I discover my own music. AS just pulls in whatever metadata you have in the files and offers no resources to improve it. Roon improves 90% of everything on my NAS. In one click I can see all of the recording where the sessiion player on a jazz album appeared. Discovery of new music is incredible with Roon. AS is crippled in this respect.
2. No tag system: Tags are incredibly powerful in Roon. I can tag all of my box sets so that I have virtual box sets in Roon. The 60-disc RCA Living Stereo classical collection is a single item that I can open, and I can scroll through all of the individual albums in that box. AS does not have this. A playlist of tracks does not provide this. AS is crippled in this respect as well.
3. Insurmountable hardware limitations: A Roon ROCK operating system is inherently better than the AS "kernel mode." AS likes to emphasize "kernel mode" but this is just a workaround for a fundamental technical failing: AS must run on top of a general purpose operating system with all of its competing processes interfering with time-sensitive audio data streams. Roon ROCK is a Linux OS with no competing processes: it is infinitely more "kernel direct" than AS can ever be because the entire kernel is dedicated to nothing but the audio processes.
4. No extensibility or scalability: With Roon I can stream to any room. I can put a $60 Ropiee-based Raspberry-Pi anywhere in the house and have a second or third system there: a system with better than "AS kernel mode" audio throughput. AS is basically a one box via USB solution.
By leaving its existing customers in the cold and shifting to a perpetual payment model (no option to buy it outright as Roon has), AS has tried to immitate Roon, failed in doing that, and initiated its own demise.
I only learned about the Audirvana Studio debacle when I went to the Audirvana website thinking I might buy the latest version if it was updated to be native on Apple Silicon. I thought this might be a complement to using Roon on a new computer I had. The Audirvana Studio site is a mess. There was no support at all for anyone who had paid for Audirvana 3.5.
I looked everywhere for information about updates for 3.5 or revision notes for patches. They utterly abandoned everyone who paid them for 3.5. Finally, I reinstalled an old version of 3.5 on the new computer and it found a minor update. It ran, but Audirvana turned its back on everyone who had previously paid for the software. Adding their mistreatment of paying customers to the long list of failure above, I don't see why anyone would give them money in perpetuity.
Other viewpoints may differ.
