So it’s your position, or belief, or assumption, that this statement on the Kirkland website was (A) not authorized by Harmon and / or (B) reveals or predicts an intent by Harmon to kill the product?
The acquisition, announced on November 27, 2023, will bolster HARMAN’s robust engineering capabilities and complement its comprehensive personalized audio experience across products and platforms.
Is it A, or B, or both?
Just as a point of principle I don’t make a habit of responding to confrontational posts. For the record, I’ve said nothing about their statement as it wasn’t what I was reading and I won’t be commenting now given the tone of your post.
There’s an interesting tendency in these discussions that someone such ans I offers a comment about what appears to be obvious and some go for the jugular. The ones doing that make all sorts of ad hom attacks. You must have an “agenda”; be bitter (FFS) and so on. It begs a question as to why anyone would get that agitated about a piece of software.
Here’s my take: Roon and its current way of operating will stay as is, at least for the foreseeable future. Harman will take RAAT and other parts of the code, bring on Spotify, Amazon, etc as ‘pass though’ partners (i.e. not needing the data dumps Roon requires), drop the whole home server thing, and call it something like ‘Harman Connect’ that works across their umbrella of products, keeping it all in the cloud.
That way, they’d maintain the status quo with the serious audiophiles already using Roon, but be able to use their acquisition to almost ‘compete’ with themselves, except it wouldn’t because it would be two different demographics and two different types of software.
The only problem with Innuos Sense, is that it’s a minimum of $2400 to buy into the software (because it has to run on their hardware), whereas Roon, despite the subscription model, can be run on just about anything (powerful enough) PC, Mac, or Linux going back ten plus years. The cost of a Pulse Zen Mini would get you almost 20 years of Roon at the current sub price.
Except that wouldn’t work for the many serious audiophiles for whom a primary benefit is making local or online library usage seemless, and with the same bells and whistles for both.
Ah, we’re at made up maths time. No-one here will ever have a Roon sub which lasts two decades. No-one.
Hmm
Not unreasonable at all. Remember the evolution – Roon started as Sooloos in very early 2007. Almost 17 yrs ago! When I shopped for my first hi fi, in-home streaming was an essential for me. It came down to Meridian/Sooloos or . . . Naim and I went with all-Naim including the UnitiServe and nDAC.
I think that as time marches on, the popularity of an in-home hardware-based server will continue to diminish. But the desire for a robust UI for controlling music playback will always be there. Of course personal preferences abound and one person’s delightful UI is another’s garbage.
I should add that there were other choices and the other dealer in my local area was doing custom pc’s with JRiver server and . . . sound cards!
“Stone knives and bearskins” for those who get the reference.
Before I was born, but I’ve seen all the re-runs multiple times.
All I’m saying is that something like an Innuos, even at its entry level, is a pretty big drop outside of the rarified stratosphere of high end audio, and that other demographic is what these conglomerate companies go after.
Retraining customers is never a good idea, doubt they will change the current package that much. Assuming it makes money.
If I remember Roon is written in .net core so they are limited to OS and silicon Microsoft supports unless they rewrite … but why buy Roon in that case, just write your own.
I guess they may start selling OEM-versions to hw-manufacturers, changing logos and themes for each. An easy way to make some extra money from the code.
So for me to have a cohesive app I need to spend north of what 2k? For an innuos device?
(genuinely interested in finding an alternative to roon, so if this app controls a ATV, raspberry Pi, Pcs, Macs etc I could be interested, but not for 2K+)
Part of the issue (and this drives a lot of the negativity on this particular topic) is experience of what happens when big buys niche. It rarely ends well for niche. Hewlett Packard bought Palm (which I loved) and claimed to want to develop Palm in conjunction with their own handheld offering. Reality was that they wanted to strip out some clever IP and use it elsewhere, fairly soon dropping out the handheld market completely.
Microsoft bought Nokia (which I loved), claiming to want to get a foothold into the mobile market. The tech gurus say that was a ruse, and that Windows Phone was just a smokescreen while the IP was redeployed.
I have no knowledge of the truth in these claims, but in both cases companies that produced devices I loved ended up disappearing.
Does Harman need an app/aggregating service? Personally I don’t see that it does. Does Roon have clever IP? It must have, as otherwise it is really just an app (and so many people say that it’s far more than that). Time will tell, but I have a suspicion that IP will be used elsewhere and Roon will become a shell. For those who use it, that would be a shame, but I doubt this will end with Roon being built into something bigger and better. History is against that.
On the question of lifetime subscriptions. What lifetime? That of the user, or that of the product…? 
I’m a Roon subscriber, I would almost say reluctant as it only just clears the utility/value bar for me. It’s genesis as a desktop application is still very evident and I don’t regard the mobile app as hugely better or different from the Naim app which I also use for my Uniti devices. Most of the metadata content is the very same stuff as Qobuz or Tidal provide and Roon radio doesn’t offer me consistently better musical choices than tidal daily or quobuz weekly discovery. What Roon does do noticeably better than anything else is search. The Qoduz/Tidal integration with my local library is no biggie because most of my library is on the streaming services anyway and one sees more and more people saying they rarely access their local libraries.
So I agree it’s very unlikely that Harman has paid big $ for any of this. I also think it is very unlikely that Roon has been acquired for the commercial opportunity to expand the user base. As demonstrated by this thread and any other similar thread there is high awareness of Roon by non-subscribers in their target market (who in many cases have had one or more trials) who Roon has failed to convert. A marketing push by a new owner isn’t going to change this, and I don’t know what the missing “killer” feature is that will capture these users, so you’re left with slashing the price to attract new users. I wouldn’t want to be presenting that business case to the Koreans!
More likely is that Roon does have some cutting edge technology they can see a different use case for. I don’t use or know about their DSP but I could imagine that might be of interest. The other thing that has fascinated me about the Roon business model is how they keep up with the tsunami of new music hitting their users every month. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there is some very clever AI helping them with that.
Whilst it’s undoubtedly a factor, is it any more hassle/expense than running a NAS. Unless you only want to stream from online services, you’ve got to run some sort of server. The roon software makes this pretty painless, granted you need a PC or Mac or Raspbeerry Pi to run it on. The other big thing in Roon’s favour is that it works with endpoints from multiple manuf
Is the hassle you’re referring to the act of using Roon to play music? I don’t recall anybody arguing that using Roon is not convenient. My comment about Google was rather esoteric and was rooted in concerns about privacy. It’s not a rabbit hole I want to dive down here and now.
Maybe a wishful thinking, I hope that Samsung would give Roon a new life. Not all acquisitions need be as catastrophic as Apple/Primephonic.
Longtime Roon (lifetime) user with an NDX2 here.
I wondered what this might mean from the NAIM side - they have always been pretty keen on Roon, and this support (and good implementation of the RAAT stuff) was what brought me to the NDX2, having liked the classic NAIM stuff for a while.
Do people think that NAIM might be wary about using/ licensing a (sort of ) competitor’s product in the future?
It could be a concern but for me the appeal of Roon is that it’s hardware independent. If Hk turn it into some sort of walled garden and put off other hardware manufacturers, they have rather killed the goose I think.