UPnP/DLNA matches RAAT just fine when it comes to “HiFi” (SQ). UPnP/DLNA has no problems when it comes to SQ. Nor does RAAT.
Roon Ready / Roon Tested / RAAT was invented to solve a broad range of issues. None were “personal”. They were all about the audio and music lover industry having a crap infrastructure (UPnP/DLNA/others) that led to incrementation improvements at best. Innovation in the non-SQ experience space was left to the Apples and Googles of the world, which didn’t care about SQ.
We strived to fix that by solving:
- devices that don’t get codec updates create incompatibilities¹
- devices that don’t support or refuse to pay certain patent fees create incompatibilities¹
- protocols so flexible in their implementation create an ecosystem of different feature sets. This leads experience producers (I’m talking about the usability experience, not the SQ) to build for the lowest common denominator
- protocols that are so distributed that they have no support for “a brain” in the system
- hardware manufacturers that don’t have good software experience can advertise “support”, but deliver a subpar experience
- hardware manufacturers sometimes lie about what they do to the audio inside their devices
- lack of support for high-res and DSD formats
- feature mismatches between using physical buttons or knobs vs streaming
- high quality cross-device audio synchronization
¹ - by incompatibilities, I’m talking about the fact that if your Apple TV can’t play your FLAC files, or your McIntosh can’t play your Ogg files, you end up having a library that can’t be used on every endpoint. These devices have a life much longer than the lifespan of the file format or streaming service of today.
Roon Ready / Roon Tested partner programs combined with RAAT solve these issues. Is support perfect? No. Is it better than what was out there before? Absolutely.
When we launched, we had 1 partner: Auralic. It was a crazy-ambitious project. We were ridiculed for inventing something new and not just supporting UPnP/DLNA. Now there are over 100 partners who have shipped products or are in the process of building/certifying/shipping. More are starting every month. It’s become the gold standard if you want something that “just works”.
Some manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon, even though their devices are already supported by Roon via custom one-off support (for example, Devialet Expert via AIR).