I owned Play-Fi speakers before I started using Roon and needed to make them work together in order to really justify the cost of building a Roon core system.
I now use Roon to send the output to the Play-Fi device and it does a good job as a whole house system. While, I have had good luck making the two inter-operate, it is not always reliable or simple as I would like it to be.
I think better integration would be good for both Roon and Play-Fi users as it gives us the freedom to send what we want to our sound systems w/out Play-Fi trying to make those choices for us and does not improve on the quality of the sound source as does Roon.
We talked to them last year at CEDIA, and their pricing model is not in alignment with our business model. There was a long and friendly discussion, but their bizdev team felt that we weren’t a good fit for them.
Pretty straightforward. Start roon server/ roon on your core machine, Play-fi software should be installed on that machine as well.
Next, set up your Play-Fi devices - grouping them however you want them to work, you can also do this from your remote using the play-Fi client ( I use an iPhone and iPad - iPad works best as you can set the DSP options if you have one). Keep the volume low, around 25% works good for me.
Next, go to your remote and start roon. Clcik on change zones and you should see something like
Was something more to getting a Play-Fi device to act as an endpoint? I have a Paradigm PW-Link, with the Play-Fi app loaded on a PC with Roon remote. I can see the Play-Fi device in the Roon zone selection, but can’t play to it. It appears to be playing, but no sound. It does work if I play something to it from the Play-Fi app. Does the Play-Fi app need to be on the actual Core itself?
No. Its that simple. I just upgraded a few days ago to the new play-fi app on IOS. The version is 4.60.180430 (Klipsch) and it is not working anymore either. Additionally, Windows 10 was upgraded to 1803 - a significant upgrade.
So it looks like time to start debugging - unfortunately all of my windows machines are upgraded.
Contacting the manufacturer, Klipsch in my case, is my next step.
I will get back if I find anything - I won’t be able to start until the weekend.
Thanks for the reply Steve. I was trying to sell my Play-Fi device until i saw your post on it working with Roon. It’s only a zone in a continuing whole house audio effort, so another Raspberry Pi with DAC HAT would do just fine with minimal cost.
I’m trying out the Roon software and I have been able to make a connection with my Mac via bootcamp and windows. I installed DTS-Playfi and connects but there doesn’t seem to be a way to play anything above 16bit /44.1 kHz. Anything 24 bit/192 kHz and less just gets converted. Is there anyway around this because I really like Roon?
I don’t have that issue on windows 10. I haven’t tested how far it will go but 24bit/96khz is not a problem.
Because Play-Fi and Roon don’t play well together (PlayFi drivers eventually mess with Roon) I am using a PlayFi gateway between Roon and my speakers so they do not have to interact - so the gateway will be the limit of the resolution I can send - which I expect to be 24bit /192Khz - the PlayFI max). It seems to work well and its one of the daily deals on Amazon - its was $99.
Hope that helps. It may also be a network limitation. In case you decide to go with the gateway, I have my DAC/AMP (Chord Mojo) between the Roon server and gateway.
This Klipsch Gateway seems to have been discontinued, no availability on Amazon Canada. Has there been a similar product or successor during the last few years?