They may be more betting on how consumers will like the spatial audio and Dolby Atmos versus the lossless and high res., which is likely.
After all, most consumers don’t even care that much about lossless and high res., as long as the music sounds halfway decent to them, as proven out by how popular Spotify has become without even having lossless.
Multichannel audio can be a significantly different experience compared with stereo - night and day difference…
With headphones, spatial audio simulates surround sound. Works really well if you use it now with Airpods Max for shows/movies…
With a speaker system and Apple TV 4K, you can play Atmos music on a 9.2.4 with a typical current AV Receiver. Or even more speakers if your Atmos processor supports it.
It needs more Atmos music content than there is available now (remember Tidal has had Atmos music on Apple TV 4K since last year) but there will be a big jump in content this year with Apple Music supporting it.
I bet at least a couple do use Roon.
30-35 years ago, Koss made a discreet 4-channel headset. When you played CD-4 or quad open reel tapes, they were great. I wonder if spatial sound can come anywhere close to that.
See below
Does that mean it could be made available on Mac hosted Roon systems? Eg running server on a Mac mini?
It is for external services. MusicKit is for iOS/iPadOS. And there’s MusicKit JS for music playback (some 3rd party web Apple Music implementations existed before official web client using this. Also requires DRM (thankfully it uses EME at least) )
Why wouldn’t apple allow 3rd party readers like Roon into their system? They have let 3rd parties like Audirvana and pure music in for over a decade to read their iTunes library.
I use all apple products when using Roon now so I’m not sure that apple would be losing out on sales if they let Roon in. I just looked at audirvana and it seems they have an interface into Apple Music with some restrictions.
I bet Apple has no interest in being integrated into Roon at all. Why should they? Apple will simply copy the functionalities of Roon (as they have already started to) and Apple will issue Hi-Res capable hardware very soon. By this they will kill the business model not only of roon but also of TIDAL, Spotify, Qobuz, Audirvana etc. All these will soon be history. One might like this or not. But the size of platform is all that matters. And I am saying this despite the fact that I think roon is the best music server software in the universe at the moment. But Apple will not admit another platform in front of their music servers to gain money from something they can provide on their own.
It’s questionable whether Apple would ever pay that kind of attention to high quality delivery. I’m not inspired about taking the USB output from a MAC and feeding into my high-end pricey DAC. About all I could do would be to reclock the USB signal or convert it to SPDIF, and neither is likely to kill the noise from a computer. iPhones and IPads are equally uninspiring as sources.
Exactly. They (Apple) recognize that consumers want better quality but they are using their streaming service to pull consumers into their closed ecosystem. They aren’t in business as a streaming company looking for more outlets to house their streaming service. The price war is intended to destroy competitors, not help them survive.
“Roon. Is. Not. Audirvana.“. Thank god. Roon destroys Audirvana. I’ve was an Audirvana and pure music user over a dozen years ago and gave them up a few years ago. Checked out Audirvana again early this year and the user interface still sucks. SQ wise, it’s a toss up.
Apple Music is just a repository of music that people pay to access. Why would they care what software accesses their music? That’s like audible shutting down all access to its books except using their software. If Roon can’t access Apple Music then I won’t subscribe to it so apple loses out on monthly income. Audirvana and pure music were always better at reading the iTunes library and I don’t see that trend changing
So Apple buys Roon .I could see this.
Unless of course you enjoy multi-zone synchronized audio playback of your own music library and Roon’s advanced DSP features.
I don’t use Tidal or Qobuz, but very much enjoy Roon with my own ~9,000 album library. Multiroom (with good sync) is important to me. I use a NUC with ROCK.
Tidal is $11.99 for MASTER after the military discount. (Including taxes). Apple music is $99 a year. Now that they will have hires streaming June 1 they are the deal to beat. Qubos will never lower their prices nor will Amazon. If anything they will raise their prices. Why? thats jsut what they do! Everyone thought Netflix would lower their prices to stay competitive and they also raised their prices. When you are controlled by a board of directors lowering prices isnt even in their vocabulary (think Comcast)! And now that Tidal has sold yet again to some other rapper of the week they will probably also rasie their prices.
Amazon just did:
And how will you stream this newfound HighRes to your system?
Taking your bat home will really hurt Apple 
Even if all 250k Roon users do the same it’s a blip to Apple
This has been the issue with Primephonic and IDAGIO, sitting with a long USB cable to you DAC is hardly elegant , also big ZERO WAF 
