Nice discussion on Roon, Roon Ready, and Roon Certified Devices.
At CES, Roon Labs’ promotional push was for Roon Ready – further decentralisation for listeners wanting to move Roon’s playback engine away from “the electrical firestorm” (Vandermeer’s words) of a music server and onto a low/er noise streamer which, when Roon Readied, behaves as a Roon Endpoint i.e. playback device. The server sends digital audio to the Roon Endpoint over the network using Roon’s own hi-res PCM- and DSD-capable transmission protocol but is clocked by the latter.
The next step, already in its early stages, is to allow third party manufacturers to host the library management portion of Roon on their own music servers – that’s Roon Core.
Mark Jenkins of New Zealand’s Antipodes Audio has already signified that he intends his music servers to be both Roon Ready and to host Roon Core; BYO mobile device for control, no other computer required. That way we get the best of both worlds: the superior sound quality of Jenkins’ servers married to Roon’s class-leading interface.
Roon Core already sits on SoTM’s sMS-1000SQ Windows Edition, which according to the South Korean company is “The world’s first Windows OS based server to combine with AudiophileOptimizer and Roon”.
Short version of the comments from the video Roon Ready - Network Audio. Roon Certified - USB audio.
One thing of note at one of the gents, sorry wasn’t sure who was who, mentions that around this summer time we might be able to expect products from ~35 different manufacturers. Great news. I hope there are plenty on display in Newport.