Hello All,
New to the site…not sure where to look if this has been posted. I’m interested in Roon and Aries integration (although not knowing what form that would take). Is there a list of companies that have offered this?
Best
Wdw
Hi Warren and welcome 
I am another Aries owner eagerly awaiting Roon and Aries integration. Auralic and Roon are definitely working together, but there is no general list of Roon Certified products as yet (see this thread).
I understand Roon will be releasing information to manufacturers at the end of this month. I’m not sure whether it will then be possible for manufacturers to update firmware and drivers so they can appear as endpoints, or whether that will require Roonspeakers. Roonspeakers will be released after Roon 1.1, but no target date has been advised.
For the moment it’s Airplay or Songcast. I can’t get Songcast to work and Airplay feels like driving a car while a man with a red flag walks in front !
Hi andybob, please could you elaborate about Roon Airplay support limits ?
Regards
Airplay is limited to 44.1k resolution (48k for video) although it will do 24 bit as well as 16 bit. It has a green dot in Roon, indicating less than bit perfect transmission. Higher res files are downsampled and dithered.
On my system there is high latency using Airplay. Music starts playing about 2s after clicking on play. A wired connection is immediate. This is a aecondary consideration for me. I’m quite happy to fill up a buffer to ensure glitchless transmission, but it does feel clunky.
Despite that latency, however, there are relatively frequent glitches or stutters at the start of a track. I havent heard glitches or stutters after that.
I have had issues getting Roon to detect when the Aries is in Airplay mode. Often I need to restart Roon or just plain wait until the Network Gods align and Airplay appears as a zone. This disrupts a smooth transition from listening to Internet radio to Roon.
Thank you andybob, are you using wired Airplay ?
No, I’m wireless with AirPlay. I haven’t tried AirPlay wired and was referring to a wired Spdif connection directly to the Vega DAC. It would be interesting to compare AirPlay over Ethernet to Aries with that, however, so thanks for the suggestion.
Ideally I would like to have Roon talk natively on WiFi to the Aries using the full functionality of both, and I understand this will happen at or around the time RoonSpeakers is released (after Roon 1.1 but no date announced yet).
Have there been any updates on the Aries front?
@danny or someone from Roon team: can you confirm that this is still planned? I understand that timelines are probably difficult to guess, but I wanted to confirm that the Auralic folks are still planning on installing RoonSpeaker software?
Thanks
Anil
nothing has changed… manufacturers are still waiting on us to deliver them code.
I was in touch with Mr. Wang in August regarding a bug and asked him about Aries support for RoonSpeakers. He said it would take Auralic about two months to implement after they received code.
I have just set up my Auralic Aries as a roon speaker after updating to V3.0
I am glad to report that using Roon and Aries is a very reliable way of streaming. I previously was using HQ player and a MAC as an end point for Roon and in my setup, there were many occasions when the connection was lost or the streaming just suddenly paused on its own.
Also when streaming DSD there is no problem with the Aries unlike with HQplayer.
In terms of sound quality, can’t really say there is much difference but for sheer convenience and reliability I have stopped using the HQ player entirely.