I’ve been eyeing the Roon Ready Onkyo TX-RZ70. It has 11 amp channels, and apparently two pairs of these can be assigned to power speakers in separate zones (rooms). Does anyone know if Roon can stream to (and more importantly, control) zones 2 and 3 separately from the main zone?
You might PM the OP of this thread who has one working with Roon. He might be able to tell you.
I suspect the answer would be no since Roon would need to see 3 RAAT independent endpoints for it to control, in the AVR’s case it is probably only going to appear as 1 RAAT endpoint.
Hi. I don’t have any zones set up so I don’t know this of the top of my head but once I go back from vacation I’ll be sure to test this.
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Thanks, @yeld! I’d love to hear about the zone capabilities and about your experience with the RZ70 in general.
I’m currently using a Denon AVR from 2014, a Raspberry Pi with Roon Bridge, and the Denon Remote Roon extension for source switching and volume control. The Denon works fine, but the Roon parts just aren’t as reliable as I’d like.
Roon can talk to multiple endpoints on a PC or Pi, so that made me hope it could talk to multiple zones on an AVR. The extra zones wouldn’t be for critical listening, so I’d even be fine with Roon playing through RAAT on Zone 1, Airplay on Zone 2, and Chromecast on Zone 3.
You sure you can stream separate apps to each zone as I don’t think that is possible reading the instructions and not heard of it for any other multizone avr. They can all have different inputs but all the streaming goes via one input called Net as will chromecast or Airplay. They are not classed as different inputs for the zones.
You should be able to route Roon to any zone via the AVRs remote/app but you won’t get multiple inputs from airplay and chromecast at same time to the amp, one will override the other for its net input.
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I am also looking to buy this receiver and am interested in exactly this functionality. Sad to hear this is not possible.
It’s strange, as it appears HA can do this:
Albeit I haven’t seen or heard that in action.
That just shows hdmi or dab which are different sources, it’s says it won’t work for NET radio, which is using the NET input. So you can use HDMI 1 in one, HDMi2 in another and NET in another but NET is counted as one source and it’s what ever your sending via it goes to all zones using NET as input.
I’m back and I’ve tested some things.
You can’t actually route the Roon Ready connection to Zone 2 or 3. Switching the input in Zone 2/3 to “Network” stops my Roon Ready connection. So basically you can stream with Roon Ready to the Main zone and that’s it.
You can use Airplay to stream music from one source (like roon) to all zones but it still doesn’t show up as multiple endpoints and you have to manage zones via the Onkyo app.
As far as the Onkyo itself it’s generally great. Audio/video quality is awesome and it comes with Dirac Live. Occasional network-related hick-ups like the app not connecting can usually be sorted with a simple power cycle. I haven’t had any major problems with it yet.
My multiroom solution for ceiling speakers is pretty DIY. I have four Raspberry Pis with little amps from hifiberry and their OS running that is by default Roon Tested. Works most of the time, sometimes the Pi would stop working for some reason. Currently looking to maybe replace those with Sonos Amps since I have some Sonos speakers around the house and Roon can stream via Sonos streaming too so at least they’d all be in a single ecosystem. Multiroom listening isn’t about quality for me anyways.
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Thanks for the quick feedback, too bad it works like that. I suppose it’s like this with all multi-zone receivers(?).
Judging by the very small number of devices in that category, there must be very few of us who want full Roon Ready (RAAT) streaming to AV receivers. And my guess is that only a tiny fraction of AV receiver owners use the multi-zone capability, so that makes this a small (and unprofitable) use case, unfortunately.
Very odd limitation, but it does describe as such in the manual I suppose:
But in any case, I don’t need to output different Roon streams to different zones. I want to be able to play Roon on Zone 2 while playing an arbitrary HDMI source on Zone 1.
For this, I think I can connect a Wiim Pro to the coaxial input on the RZ70.
However, then you run into a new bottleneck of the RZ70:
Supported sampling rates for PCM signals (stereo, mono) from a digital input are 32 kHz, 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz,
88.2 kHz, 96 kHz/16 bit, 20 bit, and 24 bit
But a Nucleus One or some other NUC with HDMI output should work?
And alternatively, Denon seems to be able to accept 192kHz on coaxial inputs…so perhaps no Onkyo.
Is that for optical and not coax perhaps?