Back in the old days I used IBM OS2 - it was a great OS.
I have seen my great SW products come and go. The future is hard to predict.
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Why math, the long version is mathematics not mathematic?
Because US uses math and UK maths. While itās true that mathematics ends in -s, it is nevertheless singular. (In German itās Mathematik BTW)
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Itās greek in origin via Latin and Norman French and used to be without the s in English too.
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Hmm. Bought a lifetime subscription - I think in 2016. Can not remember how much I paid.
However, Roon has been one of my best purchases ever! While everything else has changed it has been the one constant, and the upgrades make it better and better. I now upsample to dsd, active multichannel with convolution filters, multiple zones and setups, stream tidal/qobuz, internet radio - all things I never paid for initially. Love it!
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The progress made in Roon as it gained functionality was one of the joys of using Roon in the early days. It certainly appealed to the geek in me anyway! ROCK was the game changer. Iād built a NUC to run Roon on and was pleased to see it was a supported model when ROCK was launched. Being freed from a bulky OS was transformative. Also being in the U.K. we are quite used to finding a $500 item costs us ā¬500 or Ā£500 despite exchange rates. I think my lifetime cost under Ā£350 after rate adjustment.
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Iāve seen this question in these forums many times. I bought my lifetime sub for a much lower price near the beginning of Roon, and it has long since paid for itself. You seem to think that a lifetime is five years and that Roon will be extinct in 18-24 months. Do you have any rational explanation for those assumptions?
An āmatematikā in Danish 
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Regarding comments that with a lifetime one is making a bet that Roon will not fold (at least in five years from the beginning of the subscription).
Even if you subscribed today and Roon failed as a business before 2027, my strong suspicion is that someone else will buy Roon for its income stream and subscribers.
This made me go into the rat hole of how much Roon would fetch.
If Roon has 100k customers and say 10% are lifers, you have Roon bringing in around $13M per year in subscription fees (90k X $12 X 12). Thatās not an insignificant amount.
Will someone buy it and for how much? Hard to say, but I decided to do some research on what Roon might be worth. There are few public companies in this space and so thereās a dearth of information. But I decided to reach into related areas and find companies that do something similar in both audio hardware and software.
To get ballpark numbers I used the following.
Tidal: rev 200M; ent 302M; ratio 1.5x (ent/rev)
Koss: rev 17M; ent 78M; ratio 4.5x
Sonos: rev 1.8B; ent 1.7B; ratio 1x
Rev = annual revenue; ent = enterprise value (roughly mkt cap - debts + cash).
(Tidal is interesting because even though it was a private company we have recent sales data: it was sold to Square last year for the 302M and its 3Q2021 revenue was around 50M.)
Sonos and Koss are purely hardware, Tidal is purely software, Roon falls somewhere in between.
So letās say that Roon is valued at a conservative 2x revenue; so someone might be willing to pay 26M.
One of Roonās strengths is its loyal and affluent base. Someone might want the subscribers to expand their own offerings to them.
Maybe one those people on this forum with $400k speakers can buy them from their cash hoard?
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EBITDA multiple would be more relevant for an evaluation But we donāt know the numbers
Yeah. I used whatever I had to go on.
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That is an old number. Roon now has at least twice that many subscribers.
mmm, the founders will be buying Caribbean islands and disappearing very soon then 
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Even betterā¦ So they can fetch double of 26M!
Roon is in a unique position right now. As a new subscriber I have just done thorough research and only Audirvana was a possible alternative. But itās just not in the same league.
Howeverā¦
I nearly went down a completely different path as a Qobuz subscriber.
They are, after all, where I get all my music from and so I looked at an āall Qobuzā solution using Airplay. Itās pretty tempting to be honest. They have a Mac app, they have IOS and Android, all solid apps all talking to each other but ā¦wellā¦Airplay is just not as good as RAAT in the end.
So for now Roon is King but I can see that if Qobuz or Tidal or any of the other music providers muscle in on this area and a solid alternative to Airplay is developed by one of them, then Roon could be one of many choices, especially as the idea of āmy ripped CDās on my hardā drive becomes obsoleteā¦which is very soon I think.
So no lifetime purchase for meā¦Iāll use monthly/yearly to stay light on my feet.
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The Roon Lifetime subscription was an easy choice for us in 2019, my wife made that call. I got to pick the components and build the NUC/ROCK server so it was a team effort. Weāre in the 4th year now and no regrets on those choices.
It was what came after the initial investment in Roon that things got expensive. For the 2 of us, it was heading into the āgoldenā retirement years with a rekindled love of music.
That led from one thing to another, updated speakers for the surround sound, Roon Ready MC DAC for the entertainment system, whole house Ethernet installation, and numerous Roon Ready speaker systems for whole house music.
Then we got serious about it and remodeled our Living Room, from studs and concrete, into a soundproofed media room to provide a nice quite space to enjoy the music, and movies.
The initial investment for Roon was nothing compared to the ruffly 40k we spent to increase our enjoyment of using it.
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Signed up for the Lifetime just yesterday.
Roon is only expanding and upgrading.
Thereās no sign of extinction.
Will pay it off in 12 months (interest free) and thatās it. All sorted for life.
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Get it before itās goneā¦could be gone anytime
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Congrats, youāre bound to have years of stress free enjoyment ahead (famous last words 
).
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Exactly! Ā
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