The pay-once alternative to Roon and Audirvana.
Fidelia is a listening system for music you own — Fidelia for Mac, Fidelia for iPhone with CarPlay, the free Remote, and Bridge syncing your library between them over your own Wi-Fi. No subscription. No server. No cloud. No algorithm.
Three honest products, three honest prices.
Roon is subscription software: $14.99 a month, $149.88 a year, or $829.99 for a lifetime license — and it needs a Roon Core running somewhere in your house. Audirvana Studio is $79.99 a year; Audirvana Origin is a $149.99 one-time purchase whose product page promises, verbatim, “At least one feature yearly updates until 2027” — with EQ, convolution, and crossfeed sold separately as a $89.99 Suite.
Fidelia is a one-time purchase that keeps shipping. Multichannel and surround arrived as a free update for every Mac owner. So did a ten-band EQ with AutoEQ headphone correction. And the system grew a second platform — Fidelia for iPhone, with CarPlay. The cadence is the record, and it is public: the version history is on the App Store.
- The full Mac configuration costs about one year of Roon — and the whole two-platform system is less than 17 months of it.
- The entire Fidelia system costs less than Audirvana’s single-platform bundle — $204.96 against $219.99.
- Headphone processing is included where Audirvana charges $89.99 extra — and the standalone benchmark, CanOpener, is $79 by itself.
Competitor prices from audirvana.com, roon.app, and goodhertz.com, US new-customer pricing as of 2026-09-01.
Feature by feature.
Marked plainly: where Fidelia wins, and where it doesn’t. Comparison pages that concede nothing aren’t worth your time.
| Fidelia | Audirvana Origin | Roon | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay once, keep it | Yes | Origin: yes — “At least one feature yearly updates until 2027” | Lifetime tier, $829.99 |
| Keeps growing after you pay | Free updates ship steadily — the version history is the public record | At least one feature update a year, promised through 2027 | Updates while subscribed |
| Server required | None | None | Roon Core required |
| Native iOS player + CarPlay | Yes — $29.99 one-time | No iOS player | ARC, streaming from your Core |
| Mac ↔ iPhone library sync without a cloud | Bridge — over your own Wi-Fi | No | ARC needs your Core reachable |
| Headphone DSP included in the base app | HeadSpace — multiband crossfeed | Crossfeed sold in the $89.99 Suite | Crossfeed in MUSE |
| Hosts your own plug-ins | Three AU slots on a 16-channel bus (AUv3 on iOS) | Four AU/VST3 slots | No third-party plug-ins |
| Built-in EQ | Ten-band EQ with AutoEQ headphone-profile import — in the base app | 10-band EQ in the $89.99 Suite | Built in |
| Built-in convolver / room correction | No — by design. The AU slots host convolvers and room correction: best-in-class over built-in. | Convolution in the $89.99 Suite | Built in |
| Documented processing chain, dithered output | Published chain; psychoacoustic dither in the base app | Chain undocumented; the iZotope-era pipeline was dropped | Signal path shown in-app |
| Multichannel / surround | Yes on Mac — a 16-channel processing bus | Playback | Yes |
| Lyrion / LMS (Squeezebox) library | Yes — Mac and iOS | No | No |
| Plays to network streamers | Any UPnP/DLNA renderer — WiiM, Naim, Denon, FiiO, even HQPlayer — with the whole DSP chain, gapless | UPnP + Chromecast | Roon Ready — 1,000+ devices. Roon wins here. |
| Remote app | Free — a native iOS app | Free, iOS and Android | Everywhere — Roon’s own cross-platform UI, not native |
| TIDAL / Qobuz built in | No — Fidelia is for music you own (plus internet radio) | Studio only (subscription) | Yes. Roon wins here. |
| Recommendation algorithm | None, deliberately. Your library, your order. | None | Valence — trained on other people’s listening |
Where the others win.
Roon Ready reaches over a thousand certified streamers; Fidelia speaks standard UPnP/DLNA. Roon integrates TIDAL and Qobuz; Fidelia plays the music you own, plus internet radio. Audirvana’s remote also runs on Android; Fidelia Remote is iOS — and native, which is why it feels like it belongs there. If streaming services or Android are the center of your listening, those products serve you honestly and we’d rather you know it now.
What you can’t get anywhere else: a Lyrion (Squeezebox) library on your phone and your Mac, a plug-in chain you choose yourself, and a library that moves between your machines without touching anyone’s cloud.
In use.
“I have been using Fidelia as a go-to pre-listen before mastering, adding various audio test plugs to see how the track performs.”
“I’d regard Fidelia as one of the best options out there if you want to use crossfeed. The default settings are already great… Perfect!”
“The listening experience with Fidelia feels as if you removed cotton balls from your ears.”
The trial is the argument.
Every claim above is testable for free: both apps carry a full 14-day trial. Bring your own library and your own DAC.