I’m a bit disappointed that the first product of the Harmon acquisition is a high-price server targeted at the very upper end of the market.
I’m fairly certain Roon needs to scale to survive. Mega-pricey servers can’t be the path forward. They may be high margin and they’re certainly fun vanity products but the market is definitionally small and easy to saturate. They probably see these as a way to retain or expand their presence in high-end audio shops and the real goal is the attached, recurring subscription revenue. I get that.
What I think they really need is a much more moderately priced version that has more mass market appeal. It’s not either/or, though, so maybe we’ll see Harman branded versions or even, more likely, versions embedded into existing Harman products. Long term, I think they’re up against Sonos if they want to scale and Sonos manages to do their thing without a dedicated server.
Servers don’t have sound. They process deterministically, independent of model, and send identical bitstreams out over ethernet adapters. This is true of the servers that Qobuz and Tidal run and it’s equally true of the servers that we run in our homes. We can think as magically as we want about this, but it won’t change physics.
Fortunately, Roon appears to disagree with your assertion that they should make this case. The Titan announcement steers well clear of any such nonsensical claims and sticks to manufacturing and aesthetics: “With Titan, we’ve created a high-performance device that fuses precision manufacturing with aesthetics that evoke the interwoven nature of our music collections and Roon’s finesse for music exploration.”