What Products Work With Roon

EI presents a list of the products and platforms that work with Roon’s attractive and intuitive music delivery and discovering service.

Roon supports a wide variety of hardware devices. Expect any device described as Roon-ready, sporting USB, or AirPlay to work with Roon, in addition Squeezebox, and Meridian devices also work with the service.

Sometimes there are device-specific issues or quirks that require support, or even minor tweaks to Roon. When these issues arise, the dominant factor in how quickly they can be addressed is whether or not Roon has access to the hardware. The company openly encourages all manufacturers to send samples and to point out any erroneous information currently presented.

Note: the ‘In-House’ column denotes a product that Roon has direct access to for testing, QA, and support purposes, and that there is a relationship with the manufacturer.

Roon-ready Network Devices

These devices enjoy the company’s highest level of support. They support the flagship RAAT audio streaming technology natively, and Roon has been directly involved in testing and certifying the implementations to ensure the best user experience possible when these devices are paired with Roon.

¹ Due to technical limitations within these products, the audio interface available to the RAAT firmware is unable to support DSD or multichannel playback. OPPO is investigating a path forward, but as of now, we don’t know if or when these limitations will be bypassed.

² MQA decoding via RAAT is not yet available with this product.

³ This device does not support convenience switching due to a hardware limitation.

Roon Tested USB Devices

Roon speaks to any USB device that is recognised as a sound card by the underlying operating system. Unless otherwise noted, all of the below devices support USB Audio 2.0. One of the most difficult user-experience details for device manufacturers is volume control. Roon has noted its experience with tested devices below, to help installers/dealers make an informed decision. If you are planning to use the device in fixed output mode, or with a software volume control, this column will be less relevant.

When it comes to DSD playback, not all formats work on all platforms. For the most part, devices that support DSD64 and DSD128 do so on all platforms. Some devices can only accomplish DSD256 playback using ASIO drivers on Windows.

¹ When the USB-based volume control on this device is below 100%, DoP playback does not work
² Volume control impacts the headphone jack, but not the digital/line out.

Meridian and Sooloos Networked Devices

Meridian’s streaming protocol supports audio transport at up to 24/96. Roon will convert all higher-resolution content to 24/96 or 24/88 before transmitting it to Meridian devices. Some Meridian configurations support higher quality playback via MQA encapsulation.

Meridian’s zone linking implementation does not include a mechanism for clock drift compensation. Roon does not recommend using it unless you’re using hardware-based clock slaving to keep things in lock-step.

¹ The Ensemble and Source:Five internally resample all audio to 16/44.1
² The Control:10 resamples all 88.2kHz audio to 44.1kHz.

AirPlay Devices

Roon supports most AirPlay devices released from 2011 onwards. Roon will convert all audio at higher resolution than 16/44 to 16/44 before transmitting it to an AirPlay device.

¹ Apple TV models internally resample all audio to 16/48

Raspberry Pi HATs

Roon is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 and supports all known Raspberry Pi HATs that expose ALSA drivers on those platforms. Most of our users use DietPi or Ropieee.

Squeezebox Devices

Roon supports audio streaming to Squeezebox endpoints.

For more information on how this works and some of the limitations in the integration, see Roon’s Squeezebox Setup page.

Roon says that the Squeezebox products have rather weak Wi-Fi implementations. Playback up to 24/48 is fairly solid on these devices over WiFi, but Roon recommends using Ethernet for higher-rate applications.

Roon speaks to software-based Squeezebox emulators like Squeezelite and SqueezePlay, but Roon does not provide technical support for these configurations.

¹ Roon can send DoP encapsulated DoP64 to the Squeezebox Touch for use with a DSD capable DAC with an S/PDIF input.

Other compatibility

Roon can stream to all Sonos products. Roon also supports network streaming to KEF LS-50Wireless speakers. Due to the technical details of KEF streaming, these speakers are not Roon-ready, so linking multiple pairs of LS50w is not possible, and some RAAT-specific functionality (like convenience switching or Advanced Signal Path functionality) is not possible.

HQPlayer is an advanced, up-sampling media player. Roon says it offers some of the best software-based up-sampling and sigma-delta processing available, as well as convolution, channel mapping, and networked audio output solutions.

Roon can be configured to use HQPlayer as its audio output. In these configurations, HQPlayer owns the final connection to the device, and Roon is just passing along a stream of bits from media files.

This allows users to enjoy the processing benefits of HQPlayer and the library management capabilities of Roon at the same time.