John
T+A. Calm down – this isn’t Carry On Up Your Crossover but an abbreviated ‘Theory + Application’ belonging to 40-year-old German hi-fi company T+A whose MP 1000E, R 1000 E and MP 2000 R MKII each put CD transport, digital tuner (FM, FM-HD and DAB+), Bluetooth input and UPnP network streamer into a single box.
For users not in love with the T+A Control App that executes each multi-source device’s local UPnP and cloud streaming (Deeter, Qobuz, Tidal) via a somewhat pedestrian UI, a firmware update will soon add Roon Ready support so that each unit will instantly appear as a streamable endpoint to any installation of Roon’s server software, Core.
Catch up here:
In a recent press release, Siegfried Amft, owner and managing director of T+A, is quoted as saying, “After we accomplished the Roon Ready certification for our MP 8 in August this year, we are pleased that three of our most successful streaming devices have reached the same status now. Further T+A streaming devices are currently undergoing the certification process and will follow in due time.”
On UI, we go from this:
…to this:
Roon adds guaranteed gapless playback, hi-res audio support with signal path transparency, options for multi-room streaming and a hyper-linked magazine layout with metadata overlay. End users get what they pay for.
For Amft and his team, Roon Ready certification isn’t simply a matter of dropping Roon’s SDK onto their streaming board and calling it a day but, as Roon CEO Enno Vandermeer describes it, an “iterative process” that can see plenty of back and forth between hardware manufacturer and Roon’s development team until a specific set of (device dependent) functional requirements are met.
According to Vandermeer, this development process guarantees the best possible experience for the end user.
In this ten-minute interview, I chat with Vandermeer about Roon’s hardware partnerships, Roon Ready and how it differs from Roon Tested:
