Multizone integration with Roon

Audio Gear Talk
1

There are so many Audio Gear forums I wasn’t sure which to choose for my question. Feel free to chastise me for being in the wrong place.

My house has 16 room pre wired into a tech closet in the basement. Each room or “zone” had a dedicated Sonos Port. This was all the rave at the time but clearly there are better and more efficient solutions on the market now.

I would like to remove all the Sonos Port devices and connect each zone to a multiport amplifier. Easy enough and it is actually how Sonos delivers the amplifier sound to each room currently.

My question is if there is multizone amplifier solution that integrates with Roon. I don’t believe there is a restriction on how many sources Roon allows but if I had to I could reduce the number of sources. I would want full power to each port and would use Roon to adjust volume control. I could also group multi Roon zones together which is a nice feature on Roon that I never use right now.

Right now I have a Nucleus Titan connected to a Denon-A110. Works well for a home theater environment but I don’t find the zone 2/3 options very useful ad I would need dedicated amplification to each room “zone”.

So after all that, does anyone have any ideas on a multiport/multizone amplifier that integrates with Roon to make it a truly whole house music system. If so this would be an incredible step forward for Room.

John

2

Suggest you take a look at the Marantz M4 ROON ready. 4 zones. Can combine 4 of these to make a sixteen zone system

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3

Thank you. This is a new to
Me. Do you have any other options to compare against?

4

Not that I have personally been happy with.

NAD have a multi zone device I tried but found grouping and multi zone play unreliable.

I have successfully played 16 zones on my set up with two M4s and multiple other HEOS devices successfully.

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I haven’t used the Marantz M4 but it sounds like a good solution. I have over a dozen zones in my home and have taken a bit of a heterogeneous approach.

I have 4 zones/rooms that are driven by a WhirlWind streamer from Small Green Computer. It essentially has 4 Roon Ready endpoints and 4 DACs in a single 1U box. Super easy to setup and configure. For amplification I use an AudioAccess 8 channel amp, with each zone using 2 channels and driving in wall or in ceiling speakers in the rooms. In one case, I have the living room and dining room being driven by the same 2 channels, since they are next to each other, I didn’t need independent zones. Volume is controlled by Roon app via the WhirlWind.

For outdoors, I have 5 zones (speaker pairs in various locations in the backyard). Since it is outdoors, there was no sense in having independent zones, so I use one BlueSound Node that feeds all 10 channels and all speakers get the same 2-channel feed. Volume is controlled by Roon app using the BlueSound.

I have a couple of other zones that are highly isolated and I use BlueSound Nodes for them. I use separate amps because I had some available but you could use a PowerNode, as well. I agree with Peter that the BlueSound/NAD stuff doesn’t play well with non-BlueSound devices but I use these in place like my garage, where I don’t need to sync channels with other rooms.

The rest of my rooms (MBR, Theater, Family Room, Office, etc) use higher quality setups with good speakers, amps, DACs, and endpoints. Two of these rooms have Trinnov devices as the endpoint and volume control and the MBR has a Marantz 10 which works similarly. The rest of the rooms use various endpoints and DACs, including dCS, PS Audio, Benchmark, and others. One of these rooms is sort of my lab where I have a few different DACs and endpoints that I swap in and out and do A:B comparisons on gear. So this room has its own dedicated switch and everything is hardwired in a rack that allows me to switch things in an out easily for testing or listening.

So, there are lots of ways to go, but if you simply want to have speakers in 16 rooms that can be controlled by Roon and you don’t want to mess with the complexity that I have, I’d have to say 4 Marantz M4s mounted in a rack with a switch and power protection sounds like the easiest thing to do.

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6

A few other options depending on what is needed in each room/zone is to use a WiiM Amplifier (or one of their streamers and connect this to an individual amplifier in each room), or use a BluOS-based amplifier or streamer from Bluesound. The WiiM Amplifier is $299 and is a all-in-one amplifier and streamer.

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First, I really appreciate the thoroughness of your answer. It gives me a lot to think about. The only thing that holds me back is the price tag of 4 units but I’ve invested so much already in my main system I kinda feel like I might as well go all the way with the Marantz.

My struggle as well is that I have in ceiling speakers in each room so Roon is a bit overkill driving single speakers not optimized in anyway for the quality of a bedroom for example.

My thought is to but one Marantz and play around with it for a while. Anything Roon Ready is intriguing to me as this is my setup today in my home theater.

I’m an expert at the Roon app interface but I wonder how the family will be willing and able to learn how to use the app. I’m also a bit concerned that there are not security features for the users. So my understanding is that one user making an inadvertent change on Roon could change the entire system and I would have to figure out what this change was. I may be overthinking this but it does seem plausible.

Anyway, thanks again for your advice. I’ll let you know how my testing does.

8

Two suggestions that might be helpful in a multi-user situation at home.

  1. You can do periodic or even daily backups of your Roon configuration, which would allow you to restore from a known good config if someone makes a disastrous change.

  2. Roon does have a multi-profile feature that gives each family member or guest the ability to have their own playlists, favorites, etc. Everyone still has access to all the same music sources but this allows for some personal tailoring. You can read more about it here:

[https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/profiles#Creating_and_switching_profiles]

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One of the advantages for the family is that the Marantz used the HEOS app or allows Spotify or Tidal connect or airplay or music from a phone …

Simpler than ROON for many …

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Check out VSSL multi zone amplifiers. They are really good and stable. Great before purchase and after support.

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Are these ROON ready?

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No, they are not. To use them with Roon you would need to connect to them using AirPlay or another similar wireless protocol and run the Roon app on your phone or Tablet to send music wirelessly to the VSSL. Or you could front the VSSL with a wireless streamer like a BlueSound Node which does the streaming and DAC conversion to analog with a RCA connection to the VSSL amp. To use the 6 zone version, you would need a stack of 6 BlueSound Nodes (or similar streamer/DAC from another vendor with RCA analog outputs.) The M4 is more of an all-in-one approach with fewer devices and easier setup.

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No but that really is not needed. Each channel is airplay addressable within roon and can be grouped. I have them connected to my network via Ethernet and music is fed to them via a SonicTransporter. Works great and everything is always in sync

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Multi zone setup
I am a long time Roon user and I just recently completed a change over in my whole house system from Sonos to Wiim and could not be happier. I was a very long time user of Sonos and a big advocate until the last few years when Sonos software quality and support went downhill very quickly. Unlike you I don’t have 16 zones in my setup, but have 7. Even so, I just got tired of the constant updates and issues with Sonos’s performance. I completely upgraded my mesh network in my home with a high quality setup & 1GB service and Sonos continued to be problematic. So after a lot research I switched to Wiim’s as source and various amplification solutions. I still have Sonos moves which I use on the deck for outdoor tunes. I use airplay (via Roon) to feed them. Roon to Wiiim for all other zones. I never have connection issues or sync issues across my zones. Since you have a centralized equipment room and all your zones are wired back to it, you have lots of options with regards to amplification. It sounds like several of your zones are just for background, music, i.e. one or two small speakers in the room and any small amplifier from Wiim or Topping or countless other class D digital amps will be more than sufficient. If you want the option, you could also buy any number of multi zone amps, some of which are programmable and hook those up to the Wiim streamers. The Wiim streamers essentially act like Sonos ports and look very similar {small black boxes}. They are very simple to set up and are much more functional than Sonos and not nearly as expensive. All of this equipment could be easily set up in your central equipment room. I’m assuming you have solid Wi-Fi throughout your home or at least to the equipment room. The number of Wiims you would need would be based on how many zones you would like to have independent capability…. Meaning, if you have three bedrooms with three independent zones, then each zone would be able to play its own selection of music, or you can merge zones if that’s what you’d like to do. Roon works very well with Wiim"s unlike Sonos where I had constant issues. Just be aware that when driving your whole house with Roon you can’t mix transports like airplay and RATT…if you want whole house sync you have to choose one or the other.

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I think this is the right chat but I went ahead and purchased two Marantz 4 Zone devices and it had worked wonderfully for me. I now have 8 zone in the house and probably will purchase 1 more for a total of 12 zones. Roon handles the grouping well and with a Roon Ready the communication is flawless. I am a happy camper at this point.

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