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But what can Roon Ready give you over other user interfaces, such as Chromecast?
For those of you unfamiliar with the protocol, Roon delivers a browsing experience for digital music that you could only usually find with CD or Vinyl collections. It automatically finds photos, bios, credits, reviews, lyrics, composers, and more, delivering a rich interactive liner-notes experience for your entire digital music library. Not only that, but Roon will also link your own digital music files to the millions of tracks available to stream on TIDAL and Qobuz, so you can start deep diving into music you love, then explore and discover new tracks from the world beyond your collection. Music discovery is truly infinite with Roon.
So how does it work with your Cambridge Audio kit?
Firstly, Roon Ready devices are automatically discovered by the Roon family of apps to become available as networked audio outputs for Roon. In the way that Airplay devices “just work” with iTunes, Roon Ready devices “just work” with Roon, offering simple setup and incredible daily reliability.
By adding Roon Ready functionality, Cambridge Audio customers can enjoy all the simplicity and elegance of a modern user experience, with the very best in audio performance. Unlike a lot of other music players, Roon also supports all high-resolution streaming formats including DSD playback and MQA, with the clock of the receiving device acting as the clock master for the highest quality digital performance.
Another exciting feature about Roon Ready functionality is that the Roon Advanced Audio Transport (RAAT) SDK allows for a lot of really good two-way communication between the hardware and your Cambridge Network Audio Streamer.
With Roon as the source, bit-perfect and gapless playback are standard, and DSP operations such as upsampling, EQ, convolution, headphone processing, volume leveling and more can be applied on a per-zone basis directly within the app via the intuitive Signal Path tool. It also communicates the DSD capability of a connected S/PDIF DAC which allows Roon to automatically convert to PCM before sending.
The Signal Path tells you what your source material is, your output, and every detail in between. Whether it be bit depth or sample rate conversions, parametric EQ, other DSP options or processing inside of your Roon Ready device, Signal Path lets you know.
When it comes to multiroom audio, Roon is the ultimate solution. The Roon protocol enables multi-zone synchronisation of any of the 100+ Roon Ready devices, regardless of manufacturer. You can even set up individual profiles with playlists, tags, play history, and favourites, including albums, songs, artists, and more. So, you can be you, your guest can be your guest, and your family can be your family.
You can even switch off the speaker/line outputs automatically and change to a different volume when you plug in your headphones.
But most importantly, Roon has a vigorous certification process with clear requirements of how things should work for a stellar user experience. From the very beginning, we worked very closely with the Roon Labs team, bringing the same level of attention to detail and excellence to how we approach our digital user experience. And when you use Roon with a Cambridge Audio product, it shows.
For more information on Roon and to start your free trial visit roonlabs.com