Hegel Roon Ready status statement

Not necessarily. If people prefer a one box approach over an audiophile’s messy tech altar there are modular devices like the Mola-Mola Kula (and a couple of others). Also allowing future upgrades. By companies that don’t trick their customers by hiding the country of origin and selling cheesy parts as if they were gold.

Edit: Adding Accuphase to the list of alternatives

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The NAD m33 is amazing too. Totally modular and future proof. Also happens to be Roon Ready right now.

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I gave up on Hegel and bought an Allo Boss 2 player. This is a streamer DAC, and its DAC implementation is exceptionally high quality, measuring better than high end streamer products like Linn, Auralic, Aurender and Hifi Rose that cost many thousands of dollars. I paid $250 for it and got it preimaged with Dietpi with an additional Nirvana power supply to run it in dual power mode.

Just powered it on and it became immediately visible in Roon. It sounds amazing and connectivity is flawless. Besides Roon, it also solves another problem with Hegel and that’s Hegel’s crappy DAC.

In an ideal world I would bill this to Hegel and they would pay for it.

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But once it achieved Roon Ready status, you would still be stuck with the ‘crappy DAC’. Makes me wonder why everyone is waiting for this if that is the case? If the DAC is no good then the hegel amps are pointless because they fail to be the ‘one box streaming solution’ once you’ve bought a decent external DAC.

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Very good point.

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Allo Boss2 Player has an excellent dac, so I will not be using Hegel’s. Also Roon ready will probably never happen.

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prediction: They give up on roon ready for the integrateds and they introduce an external roon-ready streamer. Same form factor as their new phono stage.

(My record of predicting things is reaaaaaally bad. But when I think of something and don’t publicly predict it, it usually happens – and then nobody believes me!)

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8 posts were split to a new topic: Using Hegel with Home Assistent

I am a victim of Hegel’s apparent predilection for cheap components, so maximum resolution over USB is only 24/96 for me and I’m forced to go into coaxial. I configure it as a fixed-level input and do volume control exclusively via Roon, so the Home Assistant integration is only responsible for waking the Hegel 120 and switching to the coax input. I do something similar with one of the optical inputs and a Chromecast Audio, but there again I used a fixed-level configuration and rely on software control. My understanding was always that support for volume control over USB was reasonably good, i.e., you could control the volume of the amp via Roon with a dedicated external streamer (but not the other way around). You could probably lean on IP control to poll for the volume of the Hegel and then set up a trigger to set the volume of the Roon player to match. Home Assistant is infinitely configurable, but an automation like that would require a bit of diligence and determination, and it certainly wouldn’t be instantaneous. Polling frequency would have to be based on how comfortable you’d be bombarding the Hegel with status requests, although you could limit the polling to when the Roon player is in the playing state.

As an aside, I used to regret terribly only going in for the 120 and not springing for the 390, but the more this story unfolds, the happier I am that I can cut my losses here. I happen to love the sound of the H120 with my analog sources, but boy what a mess on the digital side.

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I am a lurker on Hegel’s Facebook page but never post there (the level of brainwashing and nonsense there makes it feel like the propaganda arm of an authoritarian regime). Anyways, I read there yesterday that the USB implementation in H90-190 is even more scheisse than previously thought: as it doesn’t support 88khz sample rate and it’s up to the upstream to up/down-sample to 48/96. I mean wow.

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Interesting. Though I am not sure I am willing to go the dedicated server route and automation hassle. Usually you don’t buy an all in one integrated amp to end up with multiple audio devices, servers and custom scripts.

Upnp and Airplay 1, That was nice in 2015.
But in 2022 people expect a bit more more from super-integrated amps with a 3k to 10k price tag,
Hegel is lagging one gen behind, that is minimum 3 years behind competition in terms of streaming features (think Naim unity, NAD MCD line etc).
I still hope they can pull off roon, even if I would prefer them to bring tidal connect onboard,

Still very good amps, just unbalanced all-in ones. I personnaly don’t think the DAC is a problem, but the streaming module really looks like an afterthought.

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FWIW -

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I too am an (recent) owner of the H590. I wish I had read this forum before making the purchase.

While I’m very frustrated by the delays and lack of transparency on the Hegel Roon implementation, I refuse to follow the angry ASR mob to a “lynching” based on half truths and a need to feel superior.
I don’t blindly believe the youtube reviewers either but there are a few experienced forum members who have gained my trust and whom I believe share their unbiased opinions.
I think the guys at Hegel take pride in what they do but screwed up. They are behind the 8 ball and are most likely trying to work the problem in a way that won’t open them up to lawsuits that may end their business. That said, It’s time to hire a subcontractor or two to come up with a work around. I’m guessing the people at Roon have a few contacts…

If you scroll up you’ll see the official Hegel explanation that in fact they’ve already done this by asking the vendor of the streaming module to support. The sad news in the above post is that they were transparent in admitting that they went for that particular streaming option due to price (they were looking for the cheapest option) and they later ran into memory buffer issues. As most memory buffer issues, solving one with code is unlikely to be as efficient as just getting a proper one with a larger buffer and thus, it means that whatever solution they come up with, it will inherently be a major compromise. I am putting my money that the whole digital section of Hegel will undergo a huge revamp. For the current owners, the solution is likely to be a patch that somehow works, for the new models, whenever they arrive, it will likely be a much better implementation. From a purely marketing point, they will solve it as otherwise they’ve lost almost all credibility (in the digital section I mean) and will have a hard time offering new models. However, they can turn it around by saying, “look we’ve had a massive learning from the previous models, we fixed it, but now what we know so much, the all new digital section of, say, H600, is built from scratch and is top-notch”

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A Roon transport extension at least can be released @Anders_Ertzeid
The quantity of streamer boards purchased by Hegel is not so big so the manufacturer (Libre) to be enough engaged in optimizing an MIPS processor 64 Mbytes device for RAAT buffers. The other boards made by this manufacturer has ARM processor and more memory, required for RAAT, so for them ROON Ready is OK.
Libre Wireless Technologies says Roon Ready

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If the Hegel analog section is any good and worth keeping, I would buy a good quality Roon ready streamer and run the Hegel as power amp.
Or sell the heap for cheap to me…

A streamer with DAC that is :wink:

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A simple HiFiBerry with a DAC plus would certainly do…