Paul McGowan Launches Maestro, A New Music App Taking Aim at Roon

PS Audio founder Paul McGowan has quietly launched Maestro, a new desktop music management and playback app for macOS and Windows, with iOS and Android versions slated for June 2026. Despite the profile of the man behind it, the launch has so far attracted surprisingly little coverage.

Maestro is not a streaming service. It is a front-end that sits on top of Qobuz, which is required and sold separately, and can also serve music from a NAS library accessible from anywhere. Subscription pricing is US$99 / A$149 per year, or US$10 / A$14 per month.

The headline claim is architectural. Maestro, McGowan says, is the world's first music platform that "never touches your audio stream". Where Roon, Audirvana and JRiver operate as centralised playback engines that receive the Qobuz stream, buffer it in a general-purpose computing environment and re-stream it to the network renderer using their own delivery protocols, Maestro positions itself as a pure control layer. The renderer talks directly to the source. There is, the company says, no intermediate audio engine and no re-streaming layer.

In practice, one early tester on the StereoNET forums has reported that the Windows beta presents to an Eversolo DMP-A8 as DLNA, and that the interface feels like an adapted version of Qobuz Connect. That is consistent with a UPnP push topology, where the control point hands the renderer a URL and the renderer pulls the stream itself.

Beyond the architecture, Maestro leans heavily on two features McGowan believes are genuinely new to the category. Ella is described as a personal music valet rather than a recommendation algorithm, building Living Playlists that learn from every skip and correction and responding to voice prompts such as "three hours starting with soft jazz that builds to classic rock". Ella Radio extends the idea into a contextual station that factors in time of day, weather and listening history.

The second is Prism, an in-app remastering suite with a ten-band parametric EQ, harmonic enhancement, dynamics processing, loudness compensation and high-quality upsampling. Crucially, Prism is presented as opt-in and off-path by default. The company argues this is architecturally distinct from the always-resident DSP engines in Roon or Audirvana, because the signal path remains unprocessed unless the listener chooses otherwise.

Maestro supports hi-res up to 24-bit/192kHz lossless, with no MQA and no lossy fallback. Synchronised multi-zone playback, curated audiophile demo tracks and rich editorial metadata round out the feature set.

McGowan describes Maestro as a passion project, framed around fifty years spent chasing better sound at PS Audio. Whether the topology claim translates to an audible advantage over Qobuz Connect or established DLNA control apps such as mconnect and BubbleUPnP will be the question for reviewers and listeners in the coming weeks.

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