HiBy working on Roon support in their devices

Audio Gear Talk DAPs
1

HI all,

Asked HiBy on the status of making their devices (especially my HiBy R6-II) Roon Ready and they answered the following:

Thank you for your email.

We have plans to support Roon Ready in HiBy devices. Our engineers are working hard on the realize Roon Ready on HiBy devices and will do so as soon as possible. Have a nice day ahead.

Thanks and best regards,
HiByMusic

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2

I doubt it will work on my old R5 but can live in hope.

3

It’s great to see another DAP OEM headed towards Roon support.

I’ve become a bit ambivalent about Roon Ready, though. With the introduction of Muse, ARC is close to being a viable option for in-home DAP use. It would be a fully viable option if Roon were to address the sample rate/frequency issues for built-in DACs on Android.

For me, this means that I can see just using ARC on DAPs in the future. I use Roon on my M11 Pro to control the device. I know some users, like @CrystalGipsy, use their phones which means there’s still value in a Roon Ready implementation on these devices.

Honestly, though, wouldn’t this all be just a lot simpler if there weren’t the Roon / Roon Ready / ARC distinction and there was just Roon? I know I’m oversimplifying the problem because what Roon Ready does is actually reasonably complex, but still…

4

Arc doesn’t have the features for a full Roon experience which I want at home. I want them away too but not everyone does. I can’t see latest releases from Qobuz or Tidal via the app, no internet radio, limited focus and management , and not keen on using its UI all the time for navigating my library, for away I’m fine with it at home I want full Roon experience.

I understand why they have separated them as on the go and at home have different use cases and KISS comes into play. Bit perfect on DAPs is coming so when it does arrive be interesting to compare both for long term use. They need to sort out the main remote as it’s buggy as hell at the moment and seems of get worse on iOS all the time. Hangs or just stops responding to commands.

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5

I get your point about ARC not being fully featured.

We may have to agree to disagree on whether KISS should lead to one or two client apps. I have very literally spent years and years of my professional career working on the rationalization of apps and services for which the original authors convinced themselves that a new thing should be built rather than an existing thing refactored and extended. It’s often expedient to go this route initially but, get a few years in, and you tend to realize that you allowed a false dichotomy to dictate an approach. Because of divergence that creeps in during that interval, it can be really hard to rationalize and converge.

Of course it’s always easy to speculate on this stuff with partial information but I won’t be surprised if we see Roon try to converge to a single client app at some future point. And, even if they do, that won’t necessarily mean that they would have been better off doing it that way from the outset.

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