Well seeing as you won’t be asked to pay for Rock, that is unlikely. Remember this will be a gift horse…
Can’t agree there. We have paid for the horse. We are just waiting for delivery!
You did NOT buy Rock, you bought Roon.
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The two are not exclusive. If my money has been used to develop ROCK then I have paid for it. That doesn’t mean I’ll feel short changed if ROCK isn’t delivered but I do feel an entitlement to it as its benefits to both myself and Roon have been discussed at length.
The more you keep on moaning about this the less Roon will say about any future plans for snything.
And Danny adressed the cost issue in this thread. If you keep arguing you have already paid for ROCK then he is going to change his mind and start charging for it.
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/rock-hardware-primer/21756/14
Do you not think that your iPhone dollars paid for the development of the iwatch? Does that entitle you to a free i watch? Isn’t that what companies do, put profits from one product to develop others? Does that entitle you to them all? I guess you are only thinking it does because a Roon is not charging for it. How ironic.
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Sorry, but thats just silly. Its not your money any more. You exchanged it for Roon. You buy a Porsche, the money you paid goes to develop a new model and now you think you are entitled to the new model? When you pay for something you get precisely that for which you paid. What the seller decides to do with the money is up to the seller. The real truth is that if Roon Labs decided not to develop Roon any further then so be it, you haven’t been cheated by that. The reality is that if they so chose Roon Labs could make Rock chargeable. We are just luck they have decided not to.
Now its a long long time since the fisrt rumblings about Rock so I understand the natives getting restless. I too want to see what it is all about although I probably won’t use it.
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I didn’t exchange it for goods, I exchanged my money for access to an evolving service, and it was evidence of that evolution that persuaded me to go from a subscription member to life membership. If that is the life of Roon or myself doesn’t really matter. Although it would be nice to get a good few years out of either! 
As a product ROCK is absolutely the right way to go for me. I want something that is a net benefit to both myself and the good people at Roon. And sometimes that benefit isn’t always about making money as much as saving money which I hope ROCK will achieve for Roon.
Well seeing as you won’t be asked to pay for Rock, that is unlikely. Remember this will be a gift horse…
Your point is correct, but unrelated to the one I was making. The 2nd Gen NSX suffered from notorious delays and redesigns some with good cause, some the result of debatable management decisions, all the while being periodically teased at shows, production ready prototypes being seen etc. By the time a 2nd gen NSX was actually released, the car was the subject of more mockery than any $150k car maker should ever deserve. Many didn’t even believe it had been released and thought that it was just another tease.
Sadly, following the timeline and development updates, some of this seems to be becoming the case with ROCK. By all accounts it was pretty much ready for prime time when a major redesign was chosen instead of release. I’d love to be able to beta test, but I understand why beta’s aren’t wide open. As a community, we can be a right royal PITA. Despite expectations being clearly set, there are always those who don’t read / don’t understand and then expect their hand to be held for doing / expecting things they should have known better about.
Who knows, maybe the gods at Roon might shed a little sunlight allow some more of us with technology backgrounds to sqeak into the beta program?
I respectfully disagree with this assessment. Given that ROCK is intended to facilitate easy customer assembly of an appliance-like Roon server and also given that I think the Roon team would like to see ROCK installations reduce the overall support load rather than increase it, it’s especially important that ROCK “just work” on Day 1. It really needs to be as pristine as it can possibly be. (And that’s not including any of the promised “surprises.”)
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Plus the fact that the larger the beta group, the more resource from the small Roon team in managing it will be required. I would also respectfully suggest that having a technology background might not always be a criterion for inclusion in a beta group. Diversity can be a good thing, and sometimes input from a non-technical tester can be very useful.
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Another thing to consider is that there’s more to this project than just ROCK. RoonOS is being released as ROCK to the DIY crowd, but @danny has also commented that a variant is being made available to OEMs so that they can offer Roon cores as a value-add. These boxes will likely have some specific requirements (i.e. won’t be off-the-shelf NUCs) so it’s safe to assume that there’s some additional development work going on to make sure that the underlying operating system maintains a single source tree.
Also, it’s worth reminding people that the Roon team is small and of that team a smaller subset is actually writing code. ROCK is a very small part of what they are working on at any given time and if it comes down to releasing ROCK or chasing down and squashing a nasty bug in Roon I’m sure we would all prefer they focus on the latter!
In other words, it’s coming and if it’s delayed a month or three it’s really not the end of the world
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Absolutely, it will be ready when the Roon team say and until then we will have to wait, patience is a virtue.
Russ
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Hi, all,
I have a question on ROCK (probably best directed @Danny) - will you be able to play DSD files through HDMI? Fingers crossed that this is an added feature. 
I am looking for a solution as my DAC accepts DSD only through HDMI…
J
The HDMI port is lit up (and acts no diff than a normal SPDIF)
Which DAC? Does it do DoP? if so, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work.
Hi, Danny,
I am using the DAC in my preamp: Emotiva XMC-1. I don’t think it does DoP, but someone else in the community was able to get it to work via a MAC mini. I have been unable via my QNAP NAS. The QNAP keeps on converting to PCM.
Forgot to add- after reading some other posts on ROCK- it looks like it is based on Linux (just like QNAP). The issue with the QNAP NAS is that the NAS’ kernel (which runs on Linux) appears to not support Native DSD. Will the kernel in ROCK support Native DSD through HDMI?
A post was split to a new topic: Do I need ROCK?
I thought there was more to DSD via HDMI than just being supported natively - I remember reading something about that on the PS Audio forums…but if you’re right, then I really do hope ROCK supports DSD natively as my PS Audio Directstream has the HDMI inputs.
Now, from what I understand, it’s not an HDMI output - it’s the raw data that usually is only internal to DACs (I forgot the format, sorry, bad memory). But PS Audio pushed using HDMI to push this (normally internal only) data via HDMI because it was a convenient high quality port/cable.
I hope that makes sense, I’m not an engineer. I’d have to look it up again to remember the specifics. But I’d take the HDMI input over USB any day if I could output it from a Linux based Roon!
Hilarious 
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Eric, your PS Audio DAC has got I2S input using HDMI connectors.
Lots of DACs and DDCs have chosen HDMI connectors for transferring digital audio using I2S, and some have chosen ethernet connectors (RJ45)
That does not make these DACs accept signal from HDMI outputs on players, transports and computers.
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