While we scramble to get the next Roon release out the door (some of you have already been in beta already), a totally different part of the company is launching a new phase of the Roon Store today.
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As part of Roon Tested and Roon Ready certification, we are sent at minimum 2 units of every single product for testing and support. With hundreds of products, you can easily guess what our stock rooms look like. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, packed with HiFi gear. 
We’ll have to get these rooms a bit better organized and take some photos.
Anyway, the point is that we see and live with an immense number of products, and are constantly cycling between them. For example, I personally have had 8 headphone DAC/Amps on my desk in the last year and 6 different 2-channel systems in my office. I have my own favorites, as do the other Roon Labs staff. All these products are special in many ways. For example, some look like artwork and some have non-traditional use cases. However, there are two constants for our favorites: first, they must sound great, and second, they must all work really well with Roon.
Every December, the number of questions we get for what audio gear to buy skyrockets. We find ourselves recommending the stuff we love year after year. Buying this stuff is difficult and confusing, and usually requires walking into a physical shop far away. We’d like to make this easier, online, and more understandable.
So today, we are launching the first set of HiFi gear (beyond our own Nucleus) on the Roon Store.
We’re starting with a few all-in-one Roon Ready speakers covering a range of price points. The Bluesound and Devialet lines we carry are loves by all of our staff, and constantly recommended, year after year.
The Dutch and Dutch 8c speakers are special, as we’ve always wanted to recommend them, but they were never Roon Ready certified. Today, we are shipping them with official Roon Ready firmware, and the integration is as good as it gets, just like the other products we are showcasing.
We are also handling the post-sales experience differently than most retailers. Our metric for success is measured by how quickly you can get the devices out of the box and audio playing through them. Expect unboxings, setup guides, and even videos to help you get the most out of your new toys. Later, these products will provide you with some tweaking and customization if you so desire, and we’ll help you there as well.
This is just the beginning. We have more products in the pipeline, and the products we already have need even more. For example, @genia and @john spent a week trying to figure out the best way to unbox the Dutch & Dutch 8c’s, and then filmed for 2 days, all to get what feels like an obvious 30 second long video. Believe me, it’s not obvious if you’ve not seen it before. How many people forget to take off their belt buckle before picking up a pair of expensive speakers?
Anyway, we hope you shop with us this holiday season (and beyond!) and that our favorite products will bring you as much joy as they bring to us.
Oh yah, also there was a blog post we made too… it says kinda the same thing, but more “marketing” 
The fine print: The Roon Store is only available in the US. This is where we are located physically and it makes it a logical place to start. Additionally, distribution contracts can be negotiated in our own backyard, where we know the terrain. Sorry non-US people, we'll look into options for you in the future.
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Will DSP (Room correction) and upsampling SW be available in this store ?
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Congrats on launching the Roon Store! I, for one, am looking forward to seeing which headphone DAC/amps you will be including at a future date.
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and I’m a European 
.sjb
Please be my Secret Santa???
So Roon is a HIFi retailer now? Hmmm. Pushing their “favorite” gear…hmmm. I’m sure there will be no conflict of interest here…/s. Still patiently waiting for my favorite product to become roon certified.
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At least you are. Some of us can’t even claim that now - thanks Doris.
I’m still a citizen of the continent of Europe, and feel European 
!!
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Yes, Roon Labs is now a HiFi retailer.
Would you rather we sell gear that we think stinks and is a bad experience? …or maybe gear that we just get great margin from, but don’t actually have an opinion about the quality of the experience? I personally believe that’s what most retailers do, and it’s exactly why we are curating.
What exactly are you implying? Let’s talk it through so we can address an actual issue here, or you can see the error in your sarcastic words.
Which one? We love when products are certified Roon Ready, those manufacturers bring us new Roon sales!
I just had a conversation where someone commented that Roon Ready certification is “expensive”. While we do not charge for certification, it is indeed very expensive. Most manufacturers new to the process expect it’ll go really fast and be a mostly boilerplate bolt-on to their existing product. What they find is that we do not certify these types of lame implementations, so they have to get product people and more development resources involved than they originally had expected. It’s what’s required to make a good Roon Ready experience. Those extra resources are where all the expense comes in. It takes a lot of time and care to do good Roon Ready implementation.
I’m not saying your favorite product’s manufacturer is trying to get away with a lame implementation (I don’t even know who they are), but I am saying that patience is required because we don’t just give rubber stamp certifications.
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I can’t speak to what products will be available (some I know, many more I don’t). A product curated for our store has to have a pretty good experience. We will not sell products we aren’t excited about.
Feel free to PM me with suggestions on what type of stuff we should carry.
I’m actually pretty excited about the whole concept of the Roon store and will be highly intrigued on stock carried and sold.
Count me in as a big thumbs up.
I get the $ issue, budgets and values being what they are… but explain this one… normally “the wife” in our HiFi world tends to be about looks, but the D&D 8C are quite striking in real life. My personal favorites are the white/white.
On the issue of budgets, we’ve had a few requests for credit options (like these new multi-part payment services, like Affirm or Afterpay). For those who have requested it, we’ll look into it.
No speakers. She hates speakers in our family room. I go along to get along.
My wife felt this way about speakers until she fell in love with the Devialet Phantom II’s. I believe her words were: “OMG THEY ARE SO CUTE”.
I’ve considered those. Maybe if we ever have a big fight, I’ll bring them in. Why not? Problem is, in 58 years, we’ve never had a big fight, just little arguments.
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I bought one of those in white for the dining room where it just about hides quite successfully behind a lamp.
The wife saw it and wondered why I had bought something so small until I fired it up and then she grinned.
Now all I need do is buy another for a stereo pair and 24/96.
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Will they ever be upgraded to 24/192? How about MQA?
In stereo pairs, these speakers are amazing. 
Holy moly the sound they make, and they are works of art. Even the little “Legs” or (trees for the Phantom I) are beautiful. We have videos of unboxing/setting them up on the page for the Phantom I and Phantom II.
It’s always a possibility in a future revision, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Chasing the “specs” game is something we find the best products don’t do. These manufacturers’ products ooze quality all around, not just chasing the specs. For example, you will find that most speakers downsample internally anyway because their filters don’t run at 192khz. I’d rather they take in what they use, and not run some downsampler.
Anyway, I am not saying that 192khz is bad, I’m just saying these guys didn’t make the decisions they made lightly. There is a reason they felt they should do 96khz, and they probably won’t chase the specs.
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Good questions…
But, if you stream 24/192 to them, do they downsample to 24/96? I assume it sounds just as good.