Roon environment to integrate analogue music sources

As per Roon Labs announcement, Roon music management software environment will be capable of including analogue music via new Roon Ready Relay Technology. Aimed mostly at multiroom music systems a Roon Ready Relay device, integrated or standalone, will acquire analogue signals from a record player, FM tuner, tape deck or any other source with analogue outputs, and convert it to digital for further processing inside Roon ecosystem.

While not exactly a purist audiophile approach, Roon Ready Relay offers a fairly simple way to stream music from your analogue sources to any other audio device in your Roon-controlled local network. Apart from having multiple zones for music in your house Roon Ready Relay also provides a tempting opportunity to tweak the sound using powerful digital signal processing of Roon software, where main DSP core, MUSE, can do room correction and many forms of EQ, and OPRA plug-in filters fine tune the headphone listening.

To our understanding, the Roon Ready Relay audio streaming will use lossless FLAC audio format and can be standard or high resolution by choice of hardware in a Roon Ready Relay device or module. It looks like that Roon Ready Relay is able to route connected sources to Roon server in your home network and from there the audio signal can be sent to any supported device using whatever technology is compatible: Apple AirPlay, Google Cast, mobile phone or tablet running Roon app, or RAAT-protocol for Roon ready end-points.

First product to carry Roon Ready Relay technology was introduced at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, where Victrola, a manufacturer of inexpensive audio hardware, announced Spring 2025 availability of a new 'streaming turntable', Victrola Stream Onyx.

There is also a possibility that a Roon Ready Relay device, embedded or standalone, may route digital sources into Roon ecosystem too, but the outcome remains to be seen due to, we guess, copyright control issues.

You may already know that Roon is a paid subscription software for music control, which needs to run on Windows, Mac or Linux device. Mobile devices can run Roon software by installing Roon ARC app.

Among brands MGY distributes there is quite a number of Roon partners, who have acquired Roon certification (Roon Ready or Roon tested) to ensure compatibility as end-points (playback points). Cary Audio has all current (and archived) DMS network players certified as Roon Ready. Mobile streamers from Chord Electronics, Poly and 2Go, are Roon Ready, while all current (and some archive) Chord Electronics DACs are Roon Tested. GoldNote streaming amps and DAC are Roon Ready (DS-10, DS-1000 EVO, IS-10, IS-1000).