Roon Ready and with an attractive introductory price: ROSE AIR Lite RW800
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It is… interesting… in a sense that Rose has neither competence to write necessary software themselves nor any desire to pay licensing to people who do to add such totally unexpected and obscure features as lossless Spotify and Tidal Connect to devices they already sold. So instead they will sell you a box (with basically a Wiim inside) for some extra money.
It might, barely, make sense if you hve a Rose device and really want to use it with Spotify or Tidal. In any other case you’d be far better off getting either a real Wiim or just not wasting money at all.
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It makes sense for people who have a Rose system and want to keep it in the same brand, and maybe don’t want to spend $4,000 on a full Rose streamer (though I am not sure).
I have a beautiful looking and sounding Rose all analogue RA280 (that I bought for that specific purpose), but would never really consider adding this as there are plenty of options already available. I have a Wiim Pro plus, and a Raspberry Pi running Ropiee and a an external DAC that they are both connected to and feeding into the amplifier that works perfectly.
But may be we are not the target audience. Maybe this is for the non technical person who doesn’t know what is available and how cheaply it can be gotten these days.
You’d still need it (assuming you need what it provides for the few streaming services it supports) even with the most expensive Rose streamer, because they so far haven’t bothered to license any working support of those.
Now that’s exactly what Rose has been going for in the past few years. Rather disappointing, but it might make more sense for business, as opposed to “wasting” money on designing better products.
Oh thanks for that, I hadn’t realised that, but then again I have no interest in one of their streamers as they clearly don’t tick enough boxes for me
I actually got two, as they make for nice conversation pieces and pretty good Roon endpoints. With enough fiddling with convolution filters, one can even get therm to sound almost as good as a Node or Wiim. I would not recommend them for anything else these days though.
Not so sure about their amps, honestly, they are… well, they aren’t terrible as amps, but you could get better performance at 1/5 the price, and I think it take some very specific design choices to make them look good. Really, to me RA-series, apart from looking like something made by an entirely different brand, had always looked like what a person so obviously poor that no dealer would let them into a room with one would think a Nagra looks like.
That’s pretty funny, I almost spat out my tea when I read that. Especially from a man who owns two of them.
As for the RA-280, I tested it against multiple different amps and also compared it to my Arcam SA30. The RA-280 sounds amazing with my Spendor D7.2 and it has a lot of power available. It sounds even better fed from an R2R DAC 
I wanted something very basic with no integrated DAC or Streamer and the RA-280 ticked the right boxes for me as a long term amplifier.
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They look nice, and when I got them, EverSolo and the like weren’t a thing.
I am blessed, or cursed, with having a decent Soviet education in science-y things, and a full family of real professors of acoustics and such… Help with not spending any effort on stuff like R2R 
RA-280 will sound just fine, generally, If I were building a steampunk-themed room I’d get some 
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Perfect response Boris and yes Steampunk was what I was looking for 
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I just can’t understand all this pointless discussion:
“Alternatively, the RW800 operates in standalone mode as an independent network streamer, equipping virtually any hi-fi system with a digital input for modern music streaming. In addition to TIDAL Connect, Qobuz Connect and Spotify Connect, it supports AirPlay 2, Google Cast, and Roon Ready.”
The RW 800 is set to be priced at €125 when it launches here. That’s a very good price for a Roon Ready streamer with these technical specifications.
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With tax it is €199.00 (Audiophonics.) That’s £169.00 in the UK including VAT. Or a WiiM Pro for £149.00.
Well, yeah, or you could get a Wiim (which, as far as we know, what that thing basically is) with real support and with software that actually works, for the same money.
No, the price on the audiophonic site is not 125€ + VAT (without VAT it’s 165,83 €) and fixed before Rose makes the new offer until end of september.
Anyway: Some (very loud) people are engaged in bad talking from Rose, but for me I can say, that the roon ready implementation is rock stable since years and the RW800 is already roon ready.
I’ll buy one or two items, especially because it has Google chromecast integrated and it’s not limited to 24/192 (I’m using also two Wiim devices, a Lumin, an Eversolo, Naim, many RPIs,…) like all Wiim devices.
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I never said it was €125 + VAT. I said, “With tax it is €199.00 (Audiophonics.)” That’s not priced at €125! The WiiM is a better proposition unless you are tied to Rose.
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This thread makes me feel that it’s well past time for a thread on the history and evolution of music streamers. From the lowly and long forgotten original Squeezebox to the uber expensive high end streamers of today. Would make for some interesting reading and discussions.
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Got to say that Roon Ready is the one and only thing that actually works very well on Rose devices…
So, you can use USB-C digital out only with ROSE devices? DO I understand that correctly?
Some of us never considered squeezeboxes lowly and haven’t forgotten - they certainly changed my audio journey My transporter still gets played on occasion - just out of shear nostalgia and only last week I was playing to my touch and radio through ROON. It is remarkable that they still function so well after 16 years.
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The Squeezebox is alive. This is my newly created ESP32 Squeezebox Player used with Roon for the nightstand. Designed for audiobooks and sleep music.
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For your information: