Playing well with others

If our experiences at Sooloos and Meridian taught the Roon team anything, it was do what you know. In our case, that means music and software. Sure, we’ve built hardware and shipped mass-market apps, but when your heart’s not in something, it shows.

The spark that inspired the founding of Roon Labs a year ago was the idea that there weren’t great experiences available to people who love music, audio, or both. A few streaming services have made some interesting mobile apps, but those experiences don’t translate well to listening in the home; they often don’t offer reasonable audio quality and they’re designed to be, well, mobile. Conversely, much of the software that’s designed to be used with audio systems leaves quite a bit to be desired in terms of user experience.

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What a Journey

Fifteen years ago, some friends and I started thinking about how listening to music was going to change. That was 1999, before streaming services or even the iTunes Store, so music collections were made up of CDs and files downloaded from early peer-to-peer networks.

It was a time of tremendous promise. Music, which had long been bound by the physical discs on which it was sold (and the broadcast media which promoted it), was going to become massively accessible. It was an intoxicating thought that all the music in the world might actually be something we could see and hear in our lifetimes.

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