I have a NAC-N 272 and listen to 50/50 vinyl/digital. I’ve dabbled with Roon previously and am thinking of getting into it. I can never seem to come up with a good way to manage my digital music and find it uninspiring to trawl through lots of albums looking to choose something.
Unfortunately the 272 does not support Roon, so I would need to buy a separate Roon endpoint but I like the simplicity of the 272 and don’t want to go mad with lots of boxes.
What Roon endpoints would people here recommend to hook into the 272? Presumably using the 272s DAC.
Using Raspberry Pi with IQAudio PiDac Pro. Very simple. Works flawlessly. You would only need the IQ Pi Digi if connecting into the digital in of the 272.
Chromecast audio is ( or more correctly was , as it is being discontinued) the least expensive Roon Ready
streamer . With a decent toslink, quality was quite good with my then nd5xs
I’m very impressed with the Metrum Acoustics Ambre, which feeds a Resonessence Mirus Pro DAC into a 252/SC/250. The Ambre is a significant step up from my previous front end, a UnitiServe.
I bought a Sonore UltraRendu with Upscale Audio Linear Power supply to act as a roon bridge. The core is running on a Qnap NAS and the bridge feeds my Playback Designs DAC. I used to use a Mac Mini into the DAC; I could not believe the improvement that took place when I replaced it with the UltraRendu. Sonore does cheaper units too.
I use an Allo DigiOne, which is essentially a customized raspberry pi. On my UnitiQute2 I’m plenty happy with it. It’s totally plug-and-play, and works perfectly with Roon. They make an upgraded model with a separate power supply for the most sensitive bits, but for my Qute I find no need to go there. And it’s quite affordable.
Thanks for the replies everyone. I am considering the Raspberry Pi, probably with the Allo DigiOne (not the Signature edition as the double power supply and fire-hazard-battery-pack is too much of a risk!).
So, is Roon really worth it? I don’t use Tidal, nor do I plan to as I prefer to own my music. What I really want is a better method to manage my digital library.
To us, Roon ABSOLUTELY is worth it. We enjoy interacting with our library a lot more via Roon than via the Naim app. (We don’t use Tidal either – just for our ~1800 albums on our home server.)
I bought a one-year subscription and will convert it to lifetime.
I’m using a pi into my n272 it seems to work fine. It came as a kit from iqaudio for £75 works great.
Seen a posh hat to put on a pi at£250 that gets rave reviews, but this sounds fine, does it sound better than tidal directly into my n272 don’t think I can hear a difference, but roons interface is cute.
In my view Roon is worth every penny and with such a wide choice of devices to choose from to match most budgets its never been a better time to jump in, I myself love my Atom for Roon, but I have several pis and a BlueSound Node 2 and have used an Allo USBridge. The pi options are low cost and offer good flexibility and surprisingly good sound they just look awful. Mine are now all tucked into homemade wireless speakers.
I bought Roon a week after it came out - straight to lifetime. I didn’t even go for a trial version. I had severe Sooloos envy, but could not justify the cost and clunkiness of the early system - you needed to run cables and have boxes everywhere. I kept dreaming of having someone moving it to a software only solution, so I was thrilled when Roon came out.
I hadn’t even heard of Tidal back then. I bought to manage the few thousand of CDs that I have (about 5300 now) and am thrilled. I am using Tidal too now, thanks to the integration with Roon, but I look at it as a free extra.
I can stream off my NAS to any number of points in the house. The interface is superb, it allows you to navigate through your music in a non-linear fashion, sound quality is excellent, plays all the resolutions possible and imaginable (that your hardware allows). It is superb as it is, but of course it can improve and is constantly doing so. Internet radio is clunky (Tidal excepted), the use multiple locations requires a fair amount of manual work and so on. These are minor quibbles to be honest, and if you have a sizable CD library, then i cannot think of a better or more useful product for your system
I did post something very much akin to this on the old streaming forum. I was a Real Roon Cynic™ in the face of much evangelism on the streaming forum and thought the product vastly overpriced. During the Christmas/new year period I succumbed to curiosity and downloaded and installed it (running the core on a QNAP NAS connected to my Nova via Ethernet). I used it for 24 hours before buying a lifetime licence.
I should explain that I have a small collection of albums (just over 300) which are virtually all classical. I don’t use Tidal and never shall. You may wonder, in the circumstances, why I bother with Roon. In fact, it curates my library extremely well (admittedly I’d taken a fair bit of trouble editing metadata for all my ripped CDs and downloaded hi res albums), sounds superb and allows me to control play from both my iPad (as does the Naim app, of course) and my MacBook Pro. The latter is wonderful because I’m frequently using the laptop and it’s so convenient to control the music from it.
It’s also extremely easy to create playlists and queues of tracks using Roon. (I appreciate you can do the same with the Naim app but the Roon interface is very much more comfortable…for me at least.)
I’m afraid I’ve become one of the evangelists: sorry!
They use a pi for the OS side and to run the Roon Bridge software. The audio side and psu is their own and has got very good reviews. The new Baby Ambre also looks to be of high pedigree but for about half the price.
