Hi Kenneth,
I run the Roon Ready partner program, so let me try to clarify things, since there have been a lot of messengers in different locations on this topic.
First, let me say that Bryston has been a great and enthusiastic Roon Ready partner. We met with James and Gary for the first time at CEDIA back in October and we have an enormous respect for the team there.
We distributed RAAT code to partners in November and at the CES our first partners launched, with demos running throughout the show in some very demanding audio environments (Roon Ready drove the TAD and Viola Labs demos, without a glitch, for the entire show.)
There was a beta of the Bryston BDP integration at the time, but there were still some clear bugs to be worked out in their implementation, so it was not demoed at the show.
When the BDP firmware with a Roon Ready beta version was released by Bryston, it still had not been submitted to us for testing and certification. This process always finds some ways to improve the experience and performance and finds some edge cases that haven’t been considered, which is why we require this.
We asked Gary to pull back the public beta for two reasons:
a- the production version of Roon that end users would be using in a public beta would likely be 3-4 weeks out of sync with the Alpha version of Roon with the latest RAAT capabilities, so the tests are not actually useful as information.
b- even more importantly, a major point of Roon Ready is to give end-users confidence that when they buy a Roon Ready device, it will just work. If the internet contains complaints about dropouts, etc (such as you experienced), even if it was in beta, for every partner device, then this confidence will be undermined.
So this is why beta Roon Ready support was removed from the Bryston firmware.
The comment from James about about us having a device and just waiting for certification is something he was unclear about… we do have a BDP, but Bryston has yet to submit code for testing. Trust me, as soon as it comes in, we will be on it immediately and will turn it around as fast as possible… as fast as they iterate and work with us is as fast as it will be done.
As for the comments on the bandwidth requirements of Roon, I think that once the Bryston integration has been submitted, we will work with Bryston and find the opportunities to make their integration more streamlined… RAAT (the underlying protocol of RoonReady devices) was designed for an incredibly lightweight footprint so that it could run on any device alongside Airplay or Google Cast, so there should be no problem here.
I hope this clears thing up.