File transport vs. audio stream to "Roon certified hardware"

[andybob (Andrew Cox)]

Hi NOA,
It’s a good question. Brian recently set out some of the thinking as to design choices in this post:

RAAT [was Roon Speakers] - What , When, How and for Whom?

Roon decodes the files itself and then sends a decoded stream to the endpoint, so the Aurender would be essentially a NAS if RoonServer were running externally. An important design goal of ours is that all content that Roon supports can be played on all devices, and that that support works retroactively, even with older devices that haven’t been updated–as soon as we start trusting devices to handle the raw source material (files or protected streams from providers like TIDAL), it becomes impos…