I am curious how well the Astell and Kern ACRO CA1000 Roon Ready portable DAP/DAC/Headphone Amp works as a home portable Roon endpoint.
My own experience using Roon with DAPs and iPhones etc in the past has been frustrated by dropouts. The CA1000 has 2.4 and 5ghz wifi and I’m hopeful it may be a rock-solid Roon on wifi experience (like I get with the Naim Atom).
Are there any owners of this interesting device who can comment on how well it performs in a portable scenario?
As an Android OS device Roon only speaks to the Android OS audio mixer. So limit of 24/48, I think
Hmm, I hadn’t realised this. That’s disappointing.
Roon would still do its business in the background allowing me to still listen to any stuff I have at say 192/24 though, wouldn’t it?
For me, the fact that it’s a carryable/portable Roon Ready headphone amp that I can easily move throughout the home/garden is more important than streaming the files at the highest resolution.
Certainly, it will just re-sample everything to 24/48.
I use my old Note phones for the same thing.
A&K Roon Ready devices will not resampling to 24/48.
The OS is based on Android, but A&K has changed the default mixer.
I’ve used the SP2000 as endpoint and it was limited to DSD64 and 24/192, but it is bitidentical.
The CA1000 should act in the same way and has perhaps a better WLAN included.
I stand corrected. Thanks!
Really good to know, thank you. How robust do you find the SP2000 as a Roon endpoint?
I have variously used a Fiio M11 Pro, iPhones, iPad etc as endpoints for this use case, but have suffered with intolerable levels of robustness when used with Roon, such that I’ve now abandoned it as a home portable solution in favour of just direct streaming of Qobuz using the Fiio.
How robust do you find old Note phones as endpoints?
Not perfect as endpoint and some months ago, I’ve sold it.
Hey! I have the CA1000 and use it as an endpoint. It functions wonderfully! No dropouts or flaws, and the only change is that turning on Roon prevents auto sleep even if not playing Roon, because it is always broadcasting its availability. Would definitely recommend 
That’s good to know, thank you!
Your lucky It has Dual Band WiFi (2.4 / 5.0 GHz) - other models only have 802.11 b/g/n (2.4GHz) 
Lucky me but to be fair I wouldn’t expect to face a drastic real world impact - most HD audio songs of say 4 minutes are no more than about 150MB, which would mean about 37.5MB per minute, which is just over half a megabyte per second, or about 5Mbps, which fits well into the 2.4Ghz supported speeds
Your right - but Dual Band has a better coverage and that’s for me important