I’m not sure who you spoke to over at Arcam since your post has no mention of the author, but I’d publicly call out this Arcam representative as not having a clue.
The units have been with us, but they failed certification. Arcam’s Senior Director of Global Engineering was informed of this by our certification team, so my guess is that you talked to a support person that is speaking to things they know nothing about.
We have been iterating with Arcam, with them delivering new firmware, followed up by feedback from our certification team. This has been going on for many months, with the latest turn-around being a week ago.
Arcam is being responsive, but for this person to paint this in a manner where we are at fault, is ludicrous. The only thing we are at fault for is having strict standards for the quality of product that we certify. We’ll bring this up with the higher-ups at Arcam, who are working hard to get this done right.
I just emailed about the deadlock, and clarity of Roon Ready and Roon Endpoint (wording different now than before) and the reply is promising, waiting for Roon to progress things:
Well, you might think so, but someone at Arcam (silently) changed the wording on their website from Roon Ready to Roon Endpoint at some stage in the last few weeks. Nonetheless, I hope that some good will come out of this, and that you do end up with a properly Roon Certified device.
Thats the best news so far. I really enjoy the new Arcam SA 30 and I really enjoy Roon. As a 20+ year tube guy with digital on the side, this has been a big leap of faith for me. Digital finally sounds good enough to my aging ears. I love my analog, but Roon makes hunting for music like going to an old huge record store back in the 70’s. I want this to be all sorted out. I have heard glitches and some distortion at times with the Arcam, cured by switching to an analog source and back to Roon. I bet your tech’s have found these issues as well.
Also got the OTA upgrade and the Arcam is still buggy… Roon’s “switch on/off” button merely sets the soruce to the previous value, series of “wrong actions” plays Roon at the previous source’s volume level (which is usually the one fixed at PM level 60, bad for the speakers and my ears), and worse of all, it mysteriously switches itself on after being switched off while playing via Roon. Certainly hope that Roon’s quality control picks up these annoying bugs before certification.
Wow surprised that Arcams own quality control did not pick this up themselves. They should not be relying on Roon’s quality control to pick up such basic basic things. I was thinking of one of these units once it get Roon certified but if they continue like this and iterating with Roon and submitting thigs with such basic bugs for certification it is going to be a long time. Seems like I need to look elsewhere.
Any update on this? I just started my free trial to discover that the SA30 is not certified. Would it be better to cancel the free trial (as I can’t actually try any thing at this point) and sign up later - in which case will I be able to start a new free trial?
Ultimately, it’s your call! If you’d rather cancel your free trial, that’s alright – just get in touch with us when you’re ready to come back and we’ll reopen it for you.