What's New
Roon Labs Joins the HARMAN Family
By Enno Vandermeer | VP Product Development, Software Experiences
HARMAN has always been primarily a device company. Over 75 years we have built a family of brands with the product and engineering capabilities to deliver world-class audio products in a wide range of categories. As the world's technology landscape evolves though, the way people watch and listen to content evolves as well. In today's world, entertainment experiences are increasingly driven by software technologies and the cloud-based services that enable them. To ensure that HARMAN is positioned to innovate in the future, we looked at the category-leading software companies in the audio and music markets and that journey led us to Roon.
Roon is music software designed for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. It is unique in several important ways, which have allowed a vibrant community of supporters to grow around it:
Music experience. Roon aggregates all of a user's music from a variety of sources – a local file library of rips and downloads, high-resolution streaming content from TIDAL, Qobuz, and KKBox, and internet radio – and builds a virtual music "library"; think of this as a record collection for the digital age. Next, Roon identifies everything in that library and brings in rich information (metadata) about the songs, albums, artists, composers, producers and engineers it contains. This metadata lets Roon weave a tapestry of music-related information that makes using Roon apps more like reading a magazine about your music than looking at a list of tracks. Because Roon "understands" your music library, it can make recommendations of new releases and deep catalog with uncanny accuracy and sensitivity.
"Roon Ready" compatibility. Roon allows you to play the music from your library (and beyond) to nearly any audio device in the home, using industry-standard protocols like AirPlay, USB and Chromecast, as well as its own high-performance protocol which is implemented in over 1,000 audio devices from nearly 200 brands, including many products from the HARMAN family. This innovation lets customers bridge the "walled garden" ecosystems that have long limited consumer choice in audio. This compatibility approach – which echoes HARMAN's own "works with all" philosophy – makes Roon the most flexible multi-room platform for home audio.
Sound quality. Because of its audiophile lineage, attention to detail when it comes to sound quality is in Roon's DNA. Roon’s MUSE audio engine supports nearly all popular audio formats and codecs, and is built around the philosophy that source media should be delivered bit-perfectly to the audio playback device. Roon users can optionally add a range of powerful DSP – like parametric EQ, headphone crossfeed, and room correction – on a room-by-room basis. Finally, Roon's Signal Path lets you see exactly what's happening to your audio signal, from the source file or stream all the way to the speakers or headphones.
Roon Labs was founded in 2015 by a team that had been creating music experiences at the intersection of software and hardware for many years: first with Sooloos, the groundbreaking touch-based multi-room music server, and later at HP, where they built cloud infrastructure and music apps that served tens of millions of desktop and notebook users. The Roon team joined HARMAN in November 2023, and now operates as a business unit within HARMAN's Lifestyle division under the leadership of its original founders. The team's mandate is to continue to innovate software- and service-based experiences that will enrich the enjoyment of all types of audio content.