It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anything about the A&K players supporting Roon. Back in June (or so) of last year, it was supposedly 99% done. Then towards the end of August it was “taking a long time, we’ll announce something at some point, but we haven’t dropped it”.
It’ll be interesting to see if it makes an appearance before the SP2000’s successor (which I assume it years away, since that unit is new).
For listening on the deck, now, unless I want the tube-output from my N8, I’ve just taken to using the 2Go/Hugo2 combination via Roon (using an iOS device as the controller).
My SP2000 still gets use as a portable/transportable streaming-capable player. If it does get Roon end-point support that’d be great, and I’d likely to use that instead of the 2Go/Hugo2 combination (headphone depending).
AK Connect is a bit flaky for reasons I can’t figure out, it loses the DLNA server now and then even though the WiFi AP is just a few feet away. Maybe SP1000M WiFi is just meh. As for 2Go/Hugo2, how well does it work? I’ve read enough grumbles about WiFi/Roon flakiness in Chord gear to be wary, it’s a rather pricey setup unless it works flawlessly.
My DLNA/UPnP experiences have generally been not-great to poor … excepting with Asset UPnP and the Linn DSM units, which has been largely excellent (or as good as DLNA/UPnP gets from a stability/reliability perspective).
The 2Go/Hugo2 (and by extension, using the 2Go with a 2Yu to drive other DACs, once the 2Yu arrives), is much more of a mixed bag. I covered my first few days with it here, and the statements in this post pretty much still hold today.
The short version is that it has been fantastic with Roon, and a lot less so with other interfaces/approaches - the biggest issue being local SD-card based replay. Firmware hasn’t been updated since launch, as far as I can tell (there’s no newer version exposed in the GoFigure app).
So, using more than one SD-card slot is painful at best, as MPD and the available clients don’t know how to deal with that. You have to manually switch between them. Which then sometimes triggers a re-index - which is glacially slow (an hour for a full 1TB card), and often then doesn’t show up correctly without killing and restarting the player app on your phone (etc.) and/or having the client rebuild its own indexes (much faster).
Album art from local SD-card replay is also a major pain in the arse, as the 2Go only seems to implement half of the standard for exposing it, and the more reliable/smoother client (Rigelian) has other ideas about retrieving it anyway. I literally had to write a couple of tools to go an fix up a bunch of cover art concerns that are handled cleanly by EVERY other client/server/player I’ve tried.
And I haven’t run into the reports of clicking during network replay, nor the “squealing” reported between ultra-high resolution tracks (most of which seem to be oversampled, as I’m unaware of native content at the problematic sample-rates).
It’s a much more promising start than Poly was. But it’s hard to consider it “a finished product” given the existing quirks it exhibits. It’ll get there, I think, and it already is for Roon, but any other use case I’d make sure to test before being committed to keeping it.