Key Takeaways
- Popular audio technology platform Roon has been acquired by Harman, a company owned by Samsung, raising questions about their future plans.
- While Harman has assured that Roon will remain autonomous, the buyout signals a reason for the acquisition that hasn’t been disclosed yet.
- The acquisition of Roon by Harman could put pressure on Sonos, a major player in the hi-fi audio streaming game, particularly if Harman expands Roon’s capabilities with other manufacturers’ devices.
Roon, a popular multi-devidce and multi-room audio technology platform has been bought by Harman, a company that itself was bought by Samsung back in 2017 for a cool $8 billion. There’s no word on how much money changed hands for Harman to pick up Roon, but the more interesting question revolves around what the plans could be moving forward.
So far Harman and Samsung have sought to assuage fears that the Roon system will be rolled into one of its new parent companies by saying the company will remain autonomous, but the buyout happened for a reason. That reason might not be public just yet but Sonos will no doubt be one of the companies watching on with interest.
What comes next and what does this mean for Sonos?
To understand what all of this means we first have to understand what Roon is, because it isn’t a music streaming service like Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal but rather an aggregation app and server that takes hi-fi audio and pipes it to other devices around your home. Roon server can run on a computer or other device and then act as the brains of the outfit, taking music from your own files or hi-fi streaming services like Tital or Qobuz. It can then be sent to other devices including more than 1,000 different products. AirPlay and Chromecast are supported, as are wired options depending on what device is acting as the Roon server. With us so far?
That all adds a littlec ontext to the news that Harman is buying Roon, as confirmed by a Samsung press release. And Harmon’s very happy about it.
Roon
“At HARMAN we take great pride in our ability to create exceptional audio experiences for our partners and consumers around the world,” Dave Rogers president of the lifestyle division at Harman said via that press release. “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.”
The obvious thing here would be for Samsung to start rolling Roon into its own devices and remove support for those from other brands, but that isn’t going to happen, it seems. “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,” the press release continues. “Roon’s dedication to its loyal community and its exceptional UI/UX design expertise will continue to expand and flourish with the acquisition.”
The hi-fi audio streaming game, especially when you start streaming that audio around the home and across multiple speakers, has historically been something many have turned to Sonos for. Sonos has been streaming hi-res audio via Qobuz since 2021, and the speaker company has long been the go-to for high-end audio fans who want to get a multi-room experience like no other. Apple’s AirPlay 2 is capable of doing something similar of course, and both Sonos and Roon include support for Apple’s wirleess protocol. But if Harman can expand the use of Roon Ready, Roon’s system for bringing devices from other manufacturers under its wing, we can expect Sonos to come under increasing pressure. And at a time when Sonos is looking to new categories like headphones to compensate for slowing speaker sales, this couldn’t have come at a worse time.
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