[jtwrace]

Roon’s Audiophile-Quality Music Aggregation, Connectivity and Streaming Technology to Complement HARMAN’s Comprehensive Audio Offerings
STAMFORD, CT – November 27, 2023 – HARMAN, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. focused on connected technologies for automotive, consumer, and enterprise markets, today announced the acquisition of Roon, the music management, discovery, and streaming platform for music enthusiasts.
Roon is a music player platform for music enthusiasts, which features a rich interface for browsing and discovering music, compatibility with almost any audio device, and a playback engine designed to deliver the best possible sound. Roon is available for all popular operating systems and manufactures a line of hardware server appliances called Nucleus.
“At HARMAN we take great pride in our ability to create exceptional audio experiences for our partners and consumers around the world,” said Dave Rogers, President, Lifestyle Division, HARMAN. “The team at Roon shares our passion in bringing exceptional sound and connectivity to music lovers as they browse, discover, and listen at home and on the go. We are looking forward to welcoming Roon, whose impressive talent will join the HARMAN family and bolster our already robust engineering capabilities.”
Roon will operate as a standalone Harman business with its existing team. All Roon operations will stay in place and continue to be dedicated to serving and growing Roon’s community of device partners and customers, under a joint mission to deliver engaging and personalized audio experiences across a universe of products and platforms.
Aligned with its ‘work with all’ strategy, HARMAN is committed to growing Roon’s open device ecosystem which includes collaborating with more than 160 other audio brands, delivering audio to more than 1000 high-performance devices.  Roon’s dedication to its loyal community and its exceptional UI/UX design expertise will continue to expand and flourish with the acquisition.
“Our team is ecstatic to join HARMAN, a visionary company that has been leading the audio industry forward for decades,” said Enno Vandermeer, CEO of Roon. “By combining forces with HARMAN, Roon gains the incredible scale, resources, and reach of a global technology leader, while maintaining our independence to invest in the business’s growth and future. We look forward to continuing to bring our advanced data management, SaaS expertise, and consumer engagement capabilities to our broad ecosystem of partners, as we join forces with HARMAN to deliver even greater audio experiences to our customers.”
ABOUT HARMAN
HARMAN (harman.com) designs and engineers connected products and solutions for automakers, consumers, and enterprises worldwide, including connected car systems, audio and visual products, enterprise automation solutions; and services supporting the Internet of Things. With leading brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon®, Mark Levinson® and Revel®, HARMAN is admired by audiophiles, musicians and the entertainment venues where they perform around the world. More than 50 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and connected car systems. Our software services power billions of mobile devices and systems that are connected, integrated and secure across all platforms, from work and home to car and mobile. HARMAN has a workforce of approximately 30,000 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. In March 2017, HARMAN became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics.
https://news.harman.com/releases/harman-acquires-roon-a-popular-multi-device-multi-room-audio-technology-platform?fbclid=IwAR3FcogphX4iiqdVDwVURAuBar056GMCfr3LGH5fCawFmy3nB9P53GBXOlM

[Saturn94]

Hmmm, as a Roon user since 2016, I’m not sure if this is good news or not in the long term.

[newzooreview]

It was clear from the hostile behavior of Roon towards its users over the last two years that they were focused on acquisition rather than improving the software.

My concern is the possible shenanigans in selling Roon, allowing Harman to abandon the people who purchased lifetime use. Although we took a risk and provided a chunk of capital for them to develop and expand the software, I can see Harman using the purchase as an excuse to freeze us out. E.g., lifetime becomes stuck at some version number, and we have to start paying perpetual fees for future updates, improvements, and system compatibility.

Maybe Harman will try to repair the toxicity that Roon has exhibited towards its users and allow offline usage, improve the abysmal search functionality, and further develop the sound quality, but it's not clear why they would do that.

Their primary motive would seem to be finding a way to lock people out of Roon who do not use Harman products. They would "boil the frog slowly" on that goal, but in 3-5 years non-Harman users would find Roon unappealing.

So, yeah, I don't see it as having any benefit to the users.

[newzooreview]

And yes, I read the press release. They are "aligned with its 'work with all' strategy."

And Google's motto is "do no evil."

They say what they know they need to say to not cause people to flee. And then they do what they secretly plan to do.

[Saturn94]

Of course Danny said commitments to lifetime subscribers (I bought a lifetime license in 2017) will continue to be honored.  I expect this will be true in the near term.  Long term, however, I share your concerns.  Danny can make all the assurances he wants, but he is no longer in a position to make these decisions, is he.

[Letitroll98]

I haven't had Roon in many years and I wasn't aware that there were problems.  What are the main issues besides wondering about your lifetime subscription?

[Mike B.]

I gave it a brief try a few months back. I got a offer to try it again for three months for $3. last week. I wonder if that is from Harman?

[newzooreview]

What are the main issues besides wondering about your lifetime subscription?

The issues have been many. Five significant ones have been 1) having the software secretly try to hack through the user's firewall to send information out; 2) putting a kill switch in the software as part of an "update"; 3) delaying for almost two years the fixes for the Mac app so that they could work on things that positioned them for acquisition; 4) rolling out updates that corrupted users' databases while ignoring hundreds of feature requests by users over the course of three years; and 5) deleting masses of complaints on their forum and responding rudely and aggressively to users there.

Essentially the principals of the business solicited upfront capital investment via lifetime licensing fees and invested that money in things that did not benefit those who paid the fees but rather best positioned the company to be acquired, profiting the principals of the business and leaving the people who paid hanging in the wind.

Regarding the kill switch, unlike the software that people paid a lifetime license to use, Roon now goes online to regularly phone home. If the software is not able to access the internet, it disables itself. So, people paid a hefty fee for reliable software that they could use anywhere for self-contained streaming of their locally stored files. Now they don't have what they paid for. The software ceases to function without an internet connection, which was never a requirement prior to last year.

[newzooreview]

And of course, having a kill switch installed would have been a likely precondition for a potential purchaser who would see lifetime licensees as purely a drain on their profits and who would need a way to boot them out of the system.

It would not surprise me if Harman does something like change the name from Roon to "Harmany" or something corporate and cheesy. The lifetime Roon licensees can keep using Roon without updates, improvements, support, or fixes for future hardware/OS compatibility. The people who are paying monthly will get to use the new "Harmany" service with fee increases phased in so over the course of two years they have dumped the burden of lifetime users and squeezed 30-50% more money from people locked into the system.

[newzooreview]

Maybe the lifetime licensees don't cost them that much in server time, and maybe they will focus on increasing the number of subscribed users by bundling 90-day free Roon trials with lots of Harman products and finally paying attention to the hundreds of improvements that people have requested. Maybe the aggression against user concerns on their forum will ease up now that principals feel financially secure.

Expecting the worst doesn't mean that the opposite (or something in the middle ground) is also not possible. It's just too bad that Roon has built so much distrust with its users that nobody believes assurances at this point.

I mean, when you update software and start getting security warnings from your network software and then get berated on the forum for expressing concern, it tends to erode trust. And that is my third-hand observation. In my case, the network firewall quietly denied the connection and Roon threw up a warning that my network had a problem. I knew that the "failure" was just the firewall doing its job blocking unapproved incoming connections, but I suspect many users were rightfully alarmed.

[JMW73]

I've felt for awhile that the negatives outweighed the positives and moved away from Roon.  I also didn't like paying for something that didn't have a customer service support system.  And I REALLY was afraid to buy a lifetime because you never know what the future holds.... and here we are.

[jpm]

Does Harman have a tendency to screw around with acquisitions in the ways described? I get the impression that as long as the core business is performing sufficiently they enable their brands to continue somewhat independently. That's just my impression though and not based on specific information.

I would hope that having major backing will make Roon a more compelling option for more manufacturers to integrate with and thereby solidify Roon's market position and broaden the ecosystem which would be a win all round.

I had a taste of the user forum going awry as Roon were preparing to launch ROCK. This was the product release that led them to stop announcing development updates prior to release and gave way to the "it's ready when it's ready" mantra. Danny's handling of this was painful to experience and I called him out on the contradictory statements and positions they were taking at the time. I do applaud their development of ROCK and suspect it's the kind of solution that wouldn't have come from most other manufacturers.

[wushuliu]

I can see why Roon is appealing but I never bought into it for the concerns stated. When I saw the 'Lifetime' purchase I laughed. No such thing these days. I would be shocked if they don't eventually force a subscription model on all users. One upside is that under Harman (Samsung) the price may go down. I'd be more willing to sign up for <$10/mo.

[Tyson]

Audiophiles are weird.  We're willing to spend thousands and thousands on hardware but then balk at a software subscription price.  Roon really does make streaming sound better, and the price it does it for is a bargain, IMO.

I hope Harmon doesn't mess with the core audio improvements, but we'll see.

[newzooreview]

I have probably passed the break-even point with the lifetime license, so shifting away from Roon is more of a concern for fairness, convenience, and sound quality.

I certainly hope for the best, and it is only due to the behaviors of Roon referenced above that I am pessimistic. Samsung has not been heavy-handed, that I can tell, in messing with how the Harman brands operate, although several of those brands are not the companies they used to be.

I find streaming from Qobuz not to sound as good as streaming from my NAS. I am talking about music that I purchased directly from Qobuz and stored on my NAS compared to the same files streamed directly from Qobuz. Some folks don't hear a difference; maybe I'm fooling myself. But what I want is a self-contained local music streaming option: a system I can take to a cabin in the woods and use without issues. Roon provided that; I paid them; then they stopped allowing that. They kept an old version around that was incompatible with modern hardware and software and had masses of unfixed bugs, so avoiding the kill switch became more trouble than having a kill switch embedded.

I need to just migrate away from Roon and stop complaining. I know.

[Tyson]

I guess for me the decision points are much simpler:

1. Does Roon make Qobuz sound better?
2. Is it worth the price?

[wushuliu]

Audiophiles are weird.  We're willing to spend thousands and thousands on hardware but then balk at a software subscription price.  Roon really does make streaming sound better, and the price it does it for is a bargain, IMO.

I don't balk at all subs. I have Jplay iOS subscription for $50/yr. because as a longtime Jplay user I know I'll get excellent customer service, excellent sound quality, and should anything happen I haven't put much at risk.

[GeorgeAb]

A tech acquistion is fairly common. Conspiracy theories will abound, but the reality is likely the company will be run autonomously and things will go as they have. 

I have been exceptionally happy with Roon since I came on board in 2018 when the lifetime subscription was $500. Likely the best audio investment I have made. IMO still a steal at $830. So many capabilites come with Roon.

I too had concerns when autonmoy from the internet went away with an Roon update. However, the reality has been it has not been a problem.

Likley congratulations to the long term Roon Labs employees as usually in tech when there is a buyout the stock options are a once in lifetime windfall. I know a longtime Bandcamp employee who when they were bought out did extremely well, like we're buying a house in Portland well.