Roon Ready Cert for BR-20? When will this happen?

To all Bryston BR-20 users :

I has come to our attention that a release of the internal BR-20 software might have made it to some of your units with a component called “Roon Bridge” enabled. While not shipped with your unit out of the factory, it seems that this update may have been inadvertently pushed to users whom it was not intended for. After been notified of this situation by Roon Labs and talking to them about the situation, we wanted to clarify a few details in order not to mislead you. Bryston and Roon Labs are actively and relentlessly working at completing the Roon RAAT Certification for the BR-20.

A few weeks before the launch of the BR-20, an obscure bug was discovered by Roon Labs. This bug sometimes occurs when the user makes a lot of volume changes using the front panel wheel while at the same time moving the volume control in the Roon application back and forth in quick succession. In some cases, this would cause the volume level in Roon not the accurately reflect the actual volume level on the BR-20 for a few seconds.

Because of this bug, the BR-20 Roon certification was rejected and Bryston has been tirelessly working at finding a solution for it. As such, and in accordance with Roon Terms and Conditions, the BR-20 was launched (and is still shipped) without Roon support out of the box. As some users and testers were still asking for a way to use Roon to test out product, we opted for a temporary compromise which was to make a Beta/Testing software version available with RoonBridge installed as a temporary way to play media from Roon.

This image was to be made available to select users only and under the understanding that this was a technical demo to help test the capabilities of the unit and that it was not an official version of the software sanctioned by Roon Labs. We had also notified the few users we originally sent this image to that it was to be considered experimental and without and guarantee of features or support of Roon technologies. Those would be released as soon as the certification process was completed. Despite our intent, it looks like this image might have made it to more units then expected due to a misconfiguration in our update server.

We apologize for the confusion and wish to reiterate that the Roon Bridge solution currently running on some units is not an official Roon implementation and is not supported by Roon Labs. It was always intended as a temporary patch for some testers to be able to experimentally play content from their Roon library and test out some features of the BR-20 but was and will never be a production ready solution.

As soon as the certification process is complete (which hopefully should happen any day now), an over-the-air update will be made available to all users which will include the official implementation certified by Roon Labs. Also if implementation of ROON is critical for the customer we do not recommend the BR-20 at this time but instead the 3.14 and the BDP-3?

We thank you for your understanding and will update you again once the update is available.

Kind regards,

Bryston

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