Hi, Linn employee here. There are a few misunderstandings in this thread. I’ll try to clear them up.
Linn DSMs do not use RAAT to integrate with Roon. Instead, we worked with Roon to define a different network protocol that we both implemented. The first pass at this didn’t include support for determining highest supported sample rates (a big oversight in hindsight but easily missed when over a decade of products had the same limits). We agreed an approach to advertise this over the network and updated DSM firmware accordingly. The remaining step will be for Roon to update their side to make use of this information. They have confirmed that they intend to do this but (quite reasonably) do not share timescales for internal development work. ARC is a large new feature which clearly required a lot of development effort so I can understand why it is taking time to schedule this work.
Since we don’t use RAAT, we also do not go through standard certification testing. Since we don’t fit into a standard workflow for Roon, some requests for icons or product status to be updated were missed. Once it became clear that nothing bad happened because of this, we’ve become a bit careless about requesting updates for more recent products. Apologies for any confusion this has caused. Rest assured it does not affect the integration of your DSM with Roon.
For DSD256, these tracks will still play through Roon, albeit they’ll be downsampled to 128. As a temporary workaround, you have the option of playing them at native resolution through Linn’s control point, switching back to Roon for other listening.
Pre-empting one likely question, we don’t use RAAT as it won’t run on some DSM models. Linn was first to HiFi quality network streaming and we started working on the first iteration of our core digital platform in 2003. This led to us making choices about hardware and operating system that were completely appropriate at that time but very different from people who entered the market much later. RAAT makes assumptions about Operating System and available memory that match most of the market but are incompatible with earlier DSMs. Roon explored changing RAAT but concluded that the bespoke integration I mentioned above was more practical. It would be possible for later DSM models (everything released from Selekt DSM onwards) to run RAAT code so this may be a possibility in future. As an aside, this would offer another route to DSD256 support.