Cambridgeshire, U.K. — Meridian Audio sold off its music-software applications business to Roon Labs, a newly established company run by the two men who developed the original Sooloos media server technology that Meridian later acquired.
The new company “will create software sold directly to end-users and software for manufacturers, including Meridian,” said a Roon spokesperson. New software products are already in testing at Roon Labs, and the first will be made available in the second quarter, he said.
Although Roon is an independent company, said Meridian CEO John Buchanan, “Meridian Audio and Roon Labs will continue to collaborate and work closely together into the future.”
The deal “enables our software applications team to establish a separate company to address specialist software requirements for other consumers,” Buchanan said, noting that Meridian has “fully absorbed the Sooloos experience into Meridian’s hardware product offering.”
Meridian retains the Sooloos brand name and “remains fully committed” to the Meridian Sooloos system, which has been upgraded to add Tidal’s CD-quality streaming service, he said.
Roon co-founders Enno Vandermeer and Danny Dulai were the original pair behind the development of Sooloos system. Their company, also called Sooloos, was purchased by Meridian in 2008 because Sooloos needed to partner with a company with hardware-development experience, Vandermeer said.
“When we first launched Sooloos as a company, we had to make dedicated hardware to create the experience we wanted to achieve. When we wanted to grow, Meridian was a perfect partner, being a pioneering leader in digital audio hardware,” he said.
