If its true that Auralic have gone bust and wont start up again, their app and connected streaming services may disappear and not work anymore. But I really only use Roon, dont need anything else. Am I correct in believing that since the Roon ready firmware is already built into their streamers, theres no way that it can stop functioning as a Roon Ready device ever? Or can it happen that its not roon ready anymore since they wont update anything or pay for the certification anymore if they have really gone bust?
Without speaking for Roon (I’m just a user), I believe that you are essentially (but not absolutely) correct.
RAAT, as used by Roon Ready devices, is designed to be as independent as possible from firmware updates because Roon specifically anticipated some devices not having user installable firmware. See the 6th point in the design goals section at:
Thus even if the RAAT sample transport protocol itself changes, there is no need to upgrade firmware in order to support the new transport protocol.
However, as exceedingly unlikely as it may be, it is not impossible that, at some point in the future, there may still be a need to introduce a change that requires new firmware support and thus it is not possible to state that this will never happen.
It is also probably not worth worrying about either. There are methods by which the RAAT dependency on critical parts of the device firmware (e.g. providing APIs for script installation and hardware abstraction) can be changed in such a way that, although a new mechanism may be preferred, RAAT can continue to use old API’s and methods as a fallback Thus the chance of a breaking change to the protocol would, I suspect, be very remote indeed.
Thus, whilst you are not absolutely correct, the probability of a need of a firmware update to address a change to the infrastructure surrounding the Roon Ready implementation is likely to be very remote.
If you have an Auralic device, I would continue to use it as long as you are happy with the complete (not just Roon) functionality and performance that it offers.
Sure, your Roon Ready devices won’t loose its RAAT capabilities and will continue functioning.
However, it is obvious they won’t update RAAT versions too and after some time it might happen that RAAT versions become incompatible but that is not about to come any soon since RAAT versions are designed to last long.
Let us know please should you have more questions!