Finally Roon Ready Phantoms!

[David A]

Great news indeed!

It seems that getting Roon certified is real tough these days.

As an example, a top brand like Esoteric with a flawless track record and several earlier Roon certified products has been struggling for half a year to get their latest streamer Roon certified. So well done Devialet!

Cheers,
Bernard

FWIW a "flawless track record" doesn't indicate getting things perfect, it just says that no one found any problems but whether or not you find problems can easily depend on how hard you look. When Esoteric finally get their latest streamer certified they will again have "a flawless track record" and that will still not guarantee that there is no problem with their products, just that no one has found one. Jiust as an absence of verified sightings doesn't prove that unicorns don't exist, an absence of observed problems doesn't prove that problems don't exist. What looking harder for problems does achieve is to ensure that fewer problems slip through the cracks of the certification process but the cost of that is that Roon spends more time looking for problems and probably finds a few more problems along the way, and equipment manufacturers then spend more time fixing those problems so certification ends up taking longer as a result,

Roon may be looking a bit harder these days because they didn't pick up the gigabit speed connection problem with RAAT and the Expert Pro line and that resulted in a fair bit of negative response back in the first half of 2019 with lots of arguments about whether the problem was a Roon problem or a Devialet problem. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Roon doesn't want to repeat that sort of issue so they may be working hard to ensure that they don't let another issue like that slip through their testing unnoticed.

2 years after the Expert Pros got Roon Ready certification all Devialet will say about their latest FW update for the Expert Pro line is that it improves performance with RAAT, not that they have fixed the problem. One thing that suggests is that if Roon had discovered the problem 2 years ago during the certification process then the Expert Pro line might very well still be awaiting certification and that probably tells us something about why it may be taking longer to get things Roon certified in 2021 than it did in 2018.