Harman buys Roon

[Guest]

Interesting, I'd never considered a cloud-based Roon core until your post just then. It opens up a lot more possibilities, that's for sure.

But yes, let's not talk about my ever-increasing AWS bill. I blame the "What are you spinning" threads! 

[BugPowderDust]

A cloud delivered Roon core would be nuts in terms of bandwidth and latency.

Imagine streaming half a dozen 24/192 streams into your home, simultaneously.

 

RAAT runs over multicast too so would need reengineering to work.

 

Then there are the headaches with nat and cgnat to your local devices to overcome.

 

i won’t say it’s impossible, just unlikely any time soon.

[NonPlayableCharacter]

23 minutes ago, BugPowderDust said:

A cloud delivered Roon core would be nuts in terms of bandwidth and latency.

Imagine streaming half a dozen 24/192 streams into your home, simultaneously.

 

RAAT runs over multicast too so would need reengineering to work.

 

Then there are the headaches with nat and cgnat to your local devices to overcome.

 

i won’t say it’s impossible, just unlikely any time soon.

 

I agree, which is what I was highlighting to show how good Sonos' moat is right now compared with Roon.

 

Roon can't be bundled with Harman's boom boxes without a fundamental rethink on the Core. Who in their right mind would ask a consumer to buy a BT speaker and think it acceptable to have them also build a separate Roon Core?

 

As I surmised, the future of Roon as an integrated Harman's offering is opaque at best now.

[Hydrology]

This development in Roon is not a problem, until it "might" be, so I suggest everybody just enjoy the experience of Roon and stop worrying.

The reality is cool ideas,developments and products in audio come and ago all the time - I'm reasonably young (50?) so I never assumed I would be using Roon forever. Roon will either stuff up and/or something better will come along in time which we will all have transitioned over to.

 

[NonPlayableCharacter]

19 minutes ago, Hydrology said:

This development in Roon is not a problem, until it "might" be, so I suggest everybody just enjoy the experience of Roon and stop worrying.

The reality is cool ideas,developments and products in audio come and ago all the time - I'm reasonably young (50?) so I never assumed I would be using Roon forever. Roon will either stuff up and/or something better will come along in time which we will all have transitioned over to.

 

 

No doubt it will remain in its current guise for a while yet. But that does not preclude anyone from  conjecture or visualising what an integrated product set might look like if that were a direction the product management team choose to go.

 

People are free to discuss the possibilities and the technical merits and/or hurdles as is their wont.

[Hydrology]

5 minutes ago, El Tel said:

 

People are free to discuss the possibilities and the technical merits and/or hurdles as is their wont.

 And their opinion, which is what I am/was doing.

[Guest]

I really want my Samsung fridge to be a Roon endpoint, then my life will be complete

 

Then there's Samsung AI too ...

https://research.samsung.com/artificial-intelligence

[Stereophilus]

On 28/11/2023 at 12:02 PM, BugPowderDust said:

The beauty of Roon was the vendor agnostic ecosystem of Roon Ready equipment vendors that let you build a RAAT capable system from everything from a MSB DAC to a Raspberry Pi and have them all play nice together. 

 

I hope Harman invest in the platform but that they don't make it a proprietary solution in their brands' ecosystem. There is still a lot of low hanging fruit for Roon improvements (podcasts anyone?) to be delivered and I hope the cquisition allows this innovation to continue rather than the product to die on the vine.

Taking a slight slant on this… How would non-Harman/non-Samsung companies view the process of submitting their products for Roon Ready certification now? How much trust will they have that Harman/Samsung will not just steal or re-engineer their IP?

[Hydrology]

2 minutes ago, Stereophilus said:

Taking a slight slant on this… How would non-Harman/non-Samsung companies view the process of submitting their products for Roon Ready certification now? How much trust will they have that Harman/Samsung will not just steal or re-engineer their IP?

Certainly the first thing I thought of when I heard the news. But having said that, Harman/Samsung have a few quid in the bank, I'm sure if they want to know what makes, say, a Hegel amplifier tick, they could buy just an amplifier, or better yet, the entire company.

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, Stereophilus said:

Taking a slight slant on this… How would non-Harman/non-Samsung companies view the process of submitting their products for Roon Ready certification now? How much trust will they have that Harman/Samsung will not just steal or re-engineer their IP?

 

This is what I alluded to in a previous post in this topic. There was a DAC brand I can no longer think of that went out of business 1-2 years ago - they were quite vocal about not submitting their products to Roon to be "analysed". 

 

In fairness to Roon, that might have said more about them than Roon, though.

[RockandorRoll]

I've been on the annual renewal for Roon for a few years now, (more than enough to cover the initial Lifetime membership fee) but find i just don't use it in comparison to just using my phone to cast Qobuz to my Wiim Pro.  90% of my music library is on Qobuz, the other 10% is when i pull out the CD or Vinyl. I dont think i'll renew Roon this year.

 

Not saying this is a bad buy from Harman, just wondering if Roon themselves saw a decline and jumped at the first offer. I assume this is what every start up wants, build the product to a point they can sell to someone who is going to do the work, then they retire.

 

[NonPlayableCharacter]

I was close to pulling-the-trigger on lifetime recently, but got distracted by life. I don't think my renewal is due until middle of next year, so it's a case of sit tight and wait.

 

I'm still in the Early Release program, so I am seeing incremental improvements, changes and bugfixes coming along pretty much weekly. It's heartening that they changed to this Agile release methodology rather than waiting for bigger step-changes to release.

 

I really love Roon and would hate for it to become closed-off even though my current streamer/DAC combo is already in the Harman stable.

[POV]

19 hours ago, El Tel said:

Until there is a re-engineering of architecture of Roon that moves away from requiring a user-supplied device for use as a Roon Core then Sonos will remain peerless in that turn-key space.

 

I keep seeing comments like this describing Sonos as peerless and market leading but I have to say I find it confusing.   I really don't find that to be the case and wonder where the perception comes from?  Have people that make comments like that actually used alternatives?

[NonPlayableCharacter]

5 minutes ago, POV said:

 

I keep seeing comments like this describing Sonos as peerless and market leading but I have to say I find it confusing.   I really don't find that to be the case and wonder where the perception comes from?  Have people that make comments like that actually used alternatives?

 

It's a turn-key solution with multiple options and not a one-size fits all. It is pretty much ubiquitous. They are the Apple of the boombox world. What else competes on simplicity, range of choice and out-of-the-box readiness/integration?

 

Every other active multi-speaker offering on the market is playing catch-up still. They may be behind when dealing with hi-res and in absolute sound quality, but only a tiny percentage of potential customers care about this. In all other criteria they are a long way up the road.

[POV]

15 hours ago, Hydrology said:

This development in Roon is not a problem, until it "might" be, so I suggest everybody just enjoy the experience of Roon and stop worrying.

The reality is cool ideas,developments and products in audio come and ago all the time - I'm reasonably young (50?) so I never assumed I would be using Roon forever. Roon will either stuff up and/or something better will come along in time which we will all have transitioned over to.

 

 

This sums up my feelings on the subject exactly.  Actually, I am really encouraged by the continued development of Bluos and can see a possible future where it could form the backbone of my digital music life.

[POV]

1 minute ago, El Tel said:

 

It's a turn-key solution with multiple options and not a one-size fits all. It is pretty much ubiquitous. They are the Apple of the boombox world. What else competes on simplicity, range of choice and out-of-the-box readiness/integration?

 

Every other active multi-speaker offering on the market is playing catch-up still. They may be behind when dealing with hi-res and in absolute sound quality, but only a tiny percentage of potential customers care about this. In all other criteria they are a long way up the road.

 

I don't know what criteria people are using, but I find Bluos superior in essentially every area of use.  Not only does it easily outpace Sonos on SQ (including high res support) but it has a superior range of hardware (under Bluesound Brand before you even consider NAD and NAD Masters).  Additionally now it has IMO a superior interface (Bluos 4.0).   What am I missing?  In what way is Sonos superior?

[Artnet]

 

Given Roons popularity only sup arsed ( auto-spell check thank you)  by other platforms perhaps for Soniq preference etc, it seems it will be around for a long time yet.

Lets face it it wasn't bought out by Twitter.

 

Looking at "the Grimm steamer" MU1 (and  heard this) it uses its own engineered Roon software and Roon core inbuilt. 

The Licensing of Roon for development by other major, minor manufacturers/competitors  integrating it into there own product,  I think is another form of revenue and a long term strategy of Harman's perhaps ?  If so the successful products with there own individual developed approaches will be easily seen and the knowledge shared or bought.

 

Only time will Tel

[NonPlayableCharacter]

3 minutes ago, POV said:

 

I don't know what criteria people are using, but I find Bluos superior in essentially every area of use.  Not only does it easily outpace Sonos on SQ (including high res support) but it has a superior range of hardware (under Bluesound Brand before you even consider NAD and NAD Masters).  Additionally now it has IMO a superior interface (Bluos 4.0).   What am I missing?  In what way is Sonos superior?

 

Based on standalone player/speaker/boombox devices, the market penetration and overall share shows there is no brand more recognisable and well-known in comparison to Sonos. Also, few people need hi-res outside of people who haunt places like this place, and in any case, what's the point of hi-res for relatively low quality amplification/drivers in boombox offerings.

 

I've owned both over the last 15 years. I have no need for Sonos as it doesn't meet my needs any more - I have done away with commodity type boxes like that. I moved on from Bluesound too because I went to other offerings - I'm not saying it is bad, just that I wanted different.

 

In open markets, better solutions have lost out to ones that are more widely embraced; think Betamax versus VHS, for example.

 

I've no dog in this fight, but can see the marketplace holistically which includes the 95%+ non-audiophile part of it and understand why Sonos is the behemoth that it is.

 

Sonos clearly doesn't work for you (or I), and more power to you for recognising it. But you and I are not your average consumer who wants background sound around the home or in their small cafe/bar etc. You want the quality and I am in violent agreement with you on that demand; 100%. The pair of us are not the yardstick with which to measure the market holistically though. That's it.

 

My little cul-de-sac thoughts about Roon's Core and its future integration to commodity-type active speakers offered by the likes of JBL and other Harman brands, was highlighting that the dedicated Core is its weak point and would need rethinking and re-engineering if Roon were to break-out and not just remain a niche product. BluOS and Sonos have no concept of a dedicated device for system-wide playback and management; in trying to draw parallels with Roon, you can see that BluOS and Sonos equivalents of the Roon Core distributed management systems replicated across all participating playback nodes.

 

OK - I think we have kicked-the-arse out of this little side-bar and probably best to get back to the Harman/Roon-centric discussion and the blue-skies-thinking of what it might become.

[Hydrology]

29 minutes ago, El Tel said:

 

BluOS and Sonos have no concept of a dedicated device for system-wide playback and management;

 

 

Kind of agree but not entirely true. Sonos did offer non-Sonos branded music servers (Music M8?) in their portfolio for about 3-4 years and quite a few were sold (although I cant confirm how many or if it was truly labelled a "success" - I mean, Sonos have actually, so far, never turned over a profit).

So perhaps I do agree that they really didn't have no concept.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Hydrology

[Godot]

The statement from Harmon in the linked article from the original post contains these two paragraphs, which is really the scenario a lifetime subscription owner such as myself needs. 
 

“Roon will operate as a standalone Harman business with its existing team. All Roon operations will stay in place and continue to be dedicated to serving and growing Roon’s community of device partners and customers, under a joint mission to deliver engaging and personalized audio experiences across a universe of products and platforms. 

 

Aligned with its ‘work with all’ strategy, HARMAN is committed to growing Roon’s open device ecosystem which includes collaborating with more than 160 other audio brands, delivering audio to more than 1000 high-performance devices.  Roon’s dedication to its loyal community and its exceptional UI/UX design expertise will continue to expand and flourish with the acquisition.”

[proftournesol]

This guarantees Roon's future stability and now I'm happier to pay for a lifetime subscription