DEVIALET now Roon Ready.

[G51]

This may be a silly question but here goes anyway: my expert 120 has always been recognised by Roon, I’ve always been able to connect via Ethernet and control it via Roon.
So, what does “Roon Ready” provide that wasn’t already there?

Good question.

I assume you're using Roon's implementation of AIR. AIR is basically a network protocol Devialet developed for streaming music over ethernet and wifi networks. Roon can use it's own network protocol, RAAT, to stream music over a network. If you upgrade your 120 to a 140 it will become Roon Ready and you will then have the choice of streaming music via AIR or RAAT.

Read the various Roon Ready threads here and you'll see some dispute over whether RAAT or AIR sounds better with some people on each side and some saying they can't hear a difference. I can't predict what you would hear or think about AIR vs RAAT. 

Roon allows you to link Roon Ready devices to a grouped zone so you can stream to 2 or more devices in different rooms at the same time. That's about the only extra feature I can think of which RAAT provides that AIR doesn't. Apart from the fact that you make a different zone selection in Roon's audio settings to select RAAT rather than AIR in order to stream to your Devialet, everything else seems to work in very much the same way and, since I'm only streaming to my 140, I haven't noticed any differences in operation with the change.

If you check Roon's sites for their comments on RAAT you'll see why they think it's a good protocol for streaming audio and it seems to do some things differently "under the hood". For example if you dig into the setup options for your 120, you'll see that with AIR you have an option for setting buffer size. With RAAT you don't and it's possible that there are some differences in the way the buffer is controlled. I don't know if that makes a difference.

In the end, I've got a 140 with the CI board so the latest firmware update gave me the choice. I was using Roon AIR before so I tried the Roon Ready connection with RAAT and did some comparisons. I think they sound very similar but I do hear some differences and I have a preference for RAAT so I'm getting what I think is slightly better sound but no other advantages that I can see unless I want to hook up a second Roon Ready device to another system and stream to both it and my 140 at the same time.

YMMV.

Thank you. It is a very clear explanation.