Roon acquired by Harman International [Feedback]

[Sloop_John_B (John B)]

Glass half empty man I see!

.sjb

[Saturn94]

Sure, but for how long?

Time will tell.

[DDPS]

@Brian_Neal

Very concerned about how many 3rd-party integrators will continue to partner with Roon/Samsung. One of the first efforts to boost revenue more than likely will be to hike up licensing costs to 3rd parties, most of which will balk and choose to drop Roon altogether. I will not be surprised to see Bluesound patch Roon out of BluOS within a year.

Samsung/Harmon competitors like Anthem and Premium Audio Company will likely choose to drop their promised integration plans altogether (Anthem users have already been waiting since 2019).

End of an era. Time to go set up an LMS server.

There are plenty of Harman products that work with the rest of our audio equipment.

[BCBC (Somewhere in British Columbia)]

@Brian_Neal

I will not be surprised to see Bluesound patch Roon out of BluOS within a year.

Not sure what you mean by ‘patch’. Many buyers purchased on the promise of Roon Ready. Would not be popular with many users considering the problems and deficiencies of BluOS 4.x. The rollout of 4.x has been far from well received.

[Markus_Hubner (Banned)]

There is no need to worry. Danny clearly promised that lifetime subscriber will continue as has ever been.

[Gustavo_Oviedo]

The beginning of the end.

[Dan_Herrmann]

“At HARMAN we take great pride in our ability to create exceptional audio experiences for our partners and consumers around the world,” said Dave Rogers, President, Lifestyle Division, HARMAN. “The team at Roon shares our passion in bringing exceptional sound and connectivity to music lovers as they browse, discover, and listen at home and on the go. We are looking forward to welcoming Roon, whose impressive talent will join the HARMAN family and bolster our already robust engineering capabilities.”

To me this reads like Harman will redeploy Roon expertise to other functions.

Will Roon’s technology staffers remain with Roon or shipped off to other Harman divisions?

[tripleCrotchet (Tony)]

Congratulations to roon for a successful exit.

Curious how this is going to work. For example will RAAT be spun off as a non-profit to manage certification and create an arms length from Harman. A bit like DLNA:

Organization — DLNA

[tripleCrotchet (Tony)]

The Transition of Samsung Electronics through Its M&A with Harman International

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S219985312200988X

[Ghulam_Rahmatullah]

Congrats to Danny and team. Been a Roon user for many years now and have throughly enjoyed every minute. More reach means better functionality means more services. Let the community know if you need anything from us to help rally this cause.

[erho (Eric)]

Sorry, but I have a bad feeling now…

[Scott_Muhlbaier]

It’s usually never a good idea for big conglomerate to buy out the little independent guys… time will tell but I’m not holding my breath. Arcam is a shell of what it once was under the Harmon name… I wouldn’t touch their current streamers with a 10-ft pole.

But maybe they’ll now have the resources to finally fix the horrible memory leak on the Roon core on laptop devices.

[Jon_Poletti]

My thought exactly.

I can remember congratulating the team at Slim Devices when they were purchased by Logitech.

[peter_richardson]

But it lead to us being able to have ROON control our Slimdevices ,

[BeeKay (Bernd)]

Congrats.

Questions that remain:

• will lifetime be a future offer (I guess it won’t)
• will future versioning be a leverage to squeeze out lifetime users and leave them with a version that gets no more love (may be)
• will this become an ad invested platform (Harman will want to see some ROI)
• will support see a head count increase

[ffk (Doctors Practice. Plumbers Perform.)]

@Daniel_Sandmeier

Someone might as well start coding an independent replacement now.

…with a linux GUI.

[David_Zigas]

Will this improve your response time on your support board?

[mackid1993 (David)]

@BeeKay

will future versioning be a leverage to squeeze out lifetime users and leave them with a version that gets no more love

I really hope that doesn’t happen. I trust @danny and he has insisted for years that us lifetimers would be taken care of. I’m hoping that this will help Roon grow especially in the support side which really needs an overhaul for such an expensive product and on the development side especially with ARC which hasn’t seen a new Early Access release since the summer and has a number of bugs that really need to be addressed.

I personally would like to see a future where Roon can be run fully from the cloud, for example if I’m away from home and not VPN’d in to my network it would be nice to stream Qobuz through Roon’s interface without having to rely on my local server. Perhaps with Samsung’s vast resources Roon can become more of a cloud based personal streaming service for audiophiles while still being a music player.

[BeeKay (Bernd)]

Having chosen Samsung/Harman over say Apple could also put some tension on future Roon certification of Harman competition brands. Are they treated fairly? Will they seek certification at all? Interesting times ahead

[Elnrik]

@danny

We expected to fight hard for the existing lifetimers, but Harman was awesome and didn’t even consider not continuing to support them!

I’ll be honest, Danny… I’ll believe it when I see it. I’ve several Samsung support horror stories, 1 involving a Harman product, another involving a small claims court warranty victory, and IMO they turn everything they touch into crappy over-commercialized junk.

Best wishes Life Time subs. When they take Danny to the mat more times than he can withstand and push him out, then they end lifetime subs, well… don’t say someone didn’t warn ya.