I mean, if one is shopping for a Hegel at this point, it is fairly clear that roon is just around the corner. There is also this robust conversation to serve as fair warning.
The pi solution is what I did, knowing it was a temporary fix. It doesn’t diminish the H390 as an excellent product.
Maybe Hegel should give away a Rpi with a HiFi berry hat with each purchase!
The new H390s purchased during the last 13-ish months do wake up on LAN has it
I suggested the same, slightly tongue in cheek, last summer 
“I mean, if one is shopping for a Hegel at this point, it is fairly clear that roon is just around the corner.”
Having to use an external advice via USB means that I can use the Wake on LAN feature, so I can’t use ROON to turn the amp on. I use this feature with Spotify Connect and it’s brilliant. Countdown until someone tells me to stop being lazy and walk over to the amp to turn it on, or use the remote.
Stop being lazy.
I’m assuming you don’t have a Home Assistant server in the mix, but this is how I do it for both the connected Chromecast Audio and the connected RoPieee endpoint:
You can set up a telnet switch to both wake the Hegel and switch to the appropriate input… or just wait it out. I really believe it’s coming this time.
This is absolutely not clear and obviously you are new to the Hegel/Roon games or you would not make a statement like this one. I have bought and sold the H390 2x now due to these delays. The Naim Uniti Nova is Roon Ready and it sounds on par with the H390 in the quiet moments and has a bit more dynamics in those moments to my ears. Not the horsepower of the H390 but in a ⅛ mile drag race horsepower doesn’t always win over torque.
In Goalline’s defense, that video posted above shows Roon actually in use on the H590, so I also do think Hegel is close to certification. (Close is a relative term, I understand.)
But I will agree, this promise/delay been almost comical. It’s been frustrating watching it, in that there have been no clues as to where they are in the process. Selecting some users for Beta testing might be a valuable tool, but I don’t really understand whether that’s possible. (like, I’m sure there are heavy restrictions on allowing a device to be a Roon endpoint if that device isn’t roon certified…)
The quoting there did something weird (I did ultimately), Goaline wasn’t the actual person making the statement it was Jim, but since I quoted GL’s post it appears he said it. I still hold Roon with some responsibility for this not just Hegel but regardless, Roon works & Hegel doesn’t work with Roon as advertised so it is a Hegel issue at the end of the day. For me that day ended with a Naim.
ah i see! you’re right.
There is video showing a functional Roon endpoint on an H590 going back a year. I don’t think Hegel’s failure to Roon certify is technical. I suspect it is actually financial. My issue with them has to do with the promises they keep making without fulfillment.
That video shows a H590 connected to a laptop using USB. That is not Roon endpoint support using Roon’s network transport.
Ah, i was seeing this one (and I guess it’s an H390)
Zooming in it says “Hegel H390 - Roon Advanced Audio Transport”
Doesn’t that mean it has to be Roon ready? (And I suppose that a manufacturer might be able to “pretend” something is certified for the purposes of testing/development.)
But maybe RAAT can be designated even for non-certified devices. Ahdunno.
Can’t find video you talking about, but here is another, from John Darko dated October 2019.
H390 Roon Ready beta version firmware:
That’s the one I was familiar with. That’s right, it was a H390 not a H590.
Based on what Hegel has communicated over the years we can make a pretty decent educated guess on what happened and where we are.
Hegel is quite proud of having created their own streamer implementation. Most companies take a small linux computer board and run the standard software to support roon / airplay / and so on, and that’s relatively (very relatively:) easy to do. Hegel however did not go that route, because they felt they could do a better job and have something that is higher quality by being clever on how their re-clocking the incoming signal and such, and have it be quicker and more responsive.
From what we can see with their airplay support, this worked! However by doing this it did mean they’ve also committed to having to write their own custom implementation for everything. Which was fine for something like spotify connect, and I suspect that initially they thought adding Roon support wouldn’t be that much more difficult.
As anyone who works in technology will know, the moment you think “how hard can it be”, it usually turns out you just didn’t understand just how hard it is, and it turns into a monster of a job. That’s where Hegel found its self after they had already said Roon support was coming.
From what we can tell they’ve had a version in the works for some time now, however to be Roon certified “sort of does most of the things” isn’t good enough, it has to check all the boxes and do so without any glaring bugs – and that’s where they’ve been for a while now, working on going from the initial somewhat working version, to a final fully certified version.
I suspect that the H390 movie people saw was the John Darko amp comparison he did a year ago, and he does mentions that he’s using a beta version of the Roon support.
Roon is pretty strict in making sure that Roon certified means a certain quality threshold that they can put their name behind, so beta versions can only be used on devices that they’ve approved for a very limited group of people who are building the support, so this isn’t something any of us could use.
From what Hegel has said it sounds like they thought they were close to done by the end of last year, but ran into a last minute unexpected bug that they have to fix before certification is complete.
That is quite a normal and even expected thing in these kind of projects where there’s a lot of unknowns and people are building such complex things from scratch for the first time, so to me that is something I can sympathize with.
I have no doubt they’re working as frantically and giving this all the priority they can, I can imagine how bummed out they are how this is affecting their brand and reputation. That said, while last minute bugs are a major headache, they’re also a healthy sign of a process that’s close to being complete.
While we’e all disappointed that it’s taking so long, and for good reasons, I believe there’s also no need to speculate about company sizes, financial situations and so on – this is clearly an engineering process where they made an early decision that has cost them a lot in both time, money and goodwill. But they’re also clearly almost done.
I’m willing to wait for that
I think you have made some sensible points. It was probably an honest mistake. However, I am not prepared to wait. I will just go ahead and purchase some thing else. My Hegel is now for sale.
There are great streamers out there that could run into Hegel’s DAC. Or streamer-dac combos. The reason I would pick Hegel for an integrated would be the amplification, not necessarily the streaming/DAC functionality.
That said, if the Roon integration is amazing, then that’s delicious gravy over an already fabulous meal, and I might sell my Parasound HINT6 to get an H390.
If it’s just a convenience feature with no sound-quality argument for it, well, as much as I like their clean design and a one-box solution (and amplification), I’m not gonna jump quite yet.
This is exactly what I did - bought a Lumin T2 to feed my H190 via XLR. Yes, it cost more than the Hegel but this is a major step up in SQ compared to Hegel’s DAC and streaming module, and it integrates seamlessly and flawlessly with Roon. Now I just need to upgrade to a H390 
.
