Roon criticism at Pinkfish Media

Hello all,
There is a [Moderated] [poster with the] moniker of “Cereal Killer” at Pinkfish Media audio forum who is ranting on the doom and demise of Roon. Apparently it’s due to the fact that he’s [Moderated] [not] correctly configuring the software. [Moderated]. Roon certainly works well enough for me and there is no similar competition to my mind that can compete. [!Moderated]. Brgds.

https://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/threads/roon.248474/

He certainly can’t spell. :expressionless:

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I’m dyslexic. I try my best :wink:

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In that case you’re doing very well. My brother’s dyslexic, though when he was in education, a long time ago, it wasn’t understood so he struggled.

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General advice:

I know a NAS CAN work and maybe should but for the best Roon experience , spend a few hundred quid and get an Intel NUC i5 and chuck Roon OS on it (ROCK) and call it a day.

And you’ll likely never have a support issue again.

Cheers !

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Absolutely. Thing is that there still seems to be a perception that Roon is on the brink (see that pinkfish post), when in reality they seem to have carved themselves a rather solid niche. That, and the “rental” paradigm makes it a bit of a paradoxical proposition to me: why would I buy a physical appliance solely to run software I rent ?

To push the idea a bit: wouldn’t a Nucleus-plus-subscription bundle at, say, $39.99 a month, make quite a bit of sense ?

Good question. No good answer.

An interesting ideal, let’s run some numbers based on …

Nucleus with 2 TB SSD amortised over 3 years

$1859 Sales Price
$185.9 Interest (flat 10% pa fee )
$2044.99 Total

$56.80 per month for 36 months hardware “rent to own”
$10.00 per month for 36 month Roon subscription

$66.80 per month total 3 year package

However, it’s hard for me at least to envisage this being feasible without a solid 3 year financial contract / commitment being in place … and even then I’d want to add another factor to cover 3rd party administration / bad debt recovery / insurance.

I think it quickly gets way too complex / risky … to warrant such a scheme.

That said, who knows … until very recently the month paid option did not exist.

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Twain

I’d done the math at 4 years, since that’s what the “buy now” vs “monthy” is priced at, and a $1400 “bare” Nucleus, since you’d want to tell people to bring their own drive to avoid peeps opening the boxes up.

Completely agreed with you it’s risky in practice and would require very careful thought if implemented (if only to avoid reactions like “why would I pay $90 a month (so Roon, Nucleus, streaming service) for music when I pay $20 for Netflix”).

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Nobody needs a Nucleus. In fact I wonder what the stats would be on users ponying up for one vs being turned off at Roon because they think they do. The bit of extra revenue created by the Nucleus may actually be something of a red herring.

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Mark me down as “turned off”. A dedicated piece of hardware costing two grand to mediate transferring a bit of music from the cloud to my stereo? Don’t think so.

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Hence the ROCK @$600. Plus some real effort. But I do understand that that effort is not for everyone. At that price, feels like a bargain.

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My point exactly. You DO NOT NEED a Nucleus to run Roon.

That’s an interesting take that I had not considered. I’ve been looking at it from the other direction:

Completely drop Lifetime as a stand-alone subscription option. Make a new limited Lifetime subscription that’s only available with the purchase of a new Nucleus and lock the subscription to the hardware ID. Said another way, the subscription is limited to the lifetime of the Nucleus with which it is purchased.

Nucleus with limited Lifetime, locked to hardware ID at time of purchase: $1,999
Nucleus+ with limited Lifetime, locked to hardware ID at time of purchase: $2,999

Break-even point for purchasing limited Lifetime with Nucleus is four and half years. It’s a bit shorter at three years and eight months for Nucleus+. In the unlikely event that the hardware dies before then, I suppose Roon Labs could offer prorated credit towards an annual subscription as investment protection.

If you take good care of an Intel NUC, it will easily run for double those durations, but when the hardware dies or becomes too slow to run Roon Server version 4.3 (build 3624) with acceptable performance, the (limited) Lifetime subscription expires.

Either way, this option represents good value to consumers and address objections to purchasing hardware that is 100% dedicated to supporting a subscription service. This change would also support long-term operations of Roon Labs by limiting the term of new “Lifetime” subscriptions to life of the physical hardware and eliminating the burden of adding new indefinite-term Lifetime subscriptions.

I think this could be slightly better than completely killing Lifetime. Thoughts?

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So, China is involved in the impending demise of roon? Ok, then.

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This guy has no clue what he’s talking about. He’s either completely making this up or he’s passing on nonsense. I smell lot of FUD here.

We have no outside investors in China, overseas, or anywhere. The company is 100% owned by 3 people who work at the company daily, with zero non-operating debt or external ownership.

His understanding of “cash grab” is quite poor, as one of the examples he gives is the death of the lifetime option. If we wanted a cash grab, we’d just announce that the lifetime is over in 3 months instead of raising the price or killing it as an option.

There is a claim about an ex-financial partner of our CEO @enno, but we both have no idea what/who he’s talking about. We know of no such partner. I’ve been in business with Enno since 2004. @enno, you cheating on me? :crazy_face:

As for his “the products that were working under a development license have been deauthorized by roon” is also nonsense. Those devices continue to work under development licenses, and we’ve made many normal Roon subscribers into developers so they are unaffected by enforcing our intellectual property rights. Since that Roon Ready “uncertified” situation back in September, many affected devices and their manufacturer have since been certified.

Anyway, Roon Labs has doing better than ever, with sustained growth and more new subscribers than ever before. We’ve doubled the team from about 20 employees to ~40 since COVID started. We had been selling Nucleus units faster than we could make them earlier in 2020, but have since stepped up production considerably. In fact, we just launched a new Black Friday sale today.

I’d talk about future Roon software plans, but you will have to wait for 1.8 – it’ll be our biggest release ever, addressing many long outstanding issues.

Anyway, this guy is way off. If he can’t name names and sources then I’d just assume this is all nonsense. Talk is cheap on the internet, and you are hearing about Roon’s situation straight from the horse’s mouth… I can’t tell you who this guy hiding behind “Cereal Killer” is – maybe he’d like to speak up and defend his words with some evidence?

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Is this a joke, or are you same guys from the other thread we are talking about?

indeed it is.

Agreed, to a degree - if you’re building and you’ve got home automation going, then I can see where it makes sense. We also need to keep in mind audiophilia tends to skew towards an older, more well-off crowd, and one where building your own stuff isn’t necessarily something one does, for a whole host of reasons. I’d also completely understand why team Roon would want to offload as much of the support burden as possible to local dealers in cases like that. Anyway, my modest proposal was really intended as a gedankensperiment to illustrate the mental gymnastics of “own the hardware, rent the software”.

Oh yeah, I’d be really curious to know that as well.

The way I see it, it’s a bit of a communication thing: since ROCK exists, for people who want all-in, Roon is an outlier in the “let’s sell slightly tuned commodity hardware at audiophile prices”. It’d probably be a bit tricky to add a “build your own” to the Nucleus page, marketing-wise. At the same time, that ROCK existed was one of the factors that drove me to get lifetime, because I felt like it said something about the company (whether I was right about that or not, eh).

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