Been looking for a cheap and easy solution to be able to enable older Naim streamers to be Roon enabled…
One cheap and cheerful way is to use a Raspberry Pi – one you build it yourself or get a ready made one from a well know auction site for anywhere between £110 to £125. (building it yourself saves you around £20 - £10 if you decide to use the 8GB raspberry Pi and nice metal case) – this installed with the Roon endpoint software
However the problem with this solution is that the older Naim streamers do not support a USB input… (at the rear – not sure if it’s possible to use the front USP port as a input from a Roon endpoint device)
An alternative is to again use a Raspberry Pi (I used the 8GB version £73.50) + HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro (£38) + case (£12 for plastic or £22 for metal) + Power supply (£7.50) + microSD memory card (32gb approx. £6 from amazon) – all in for less than £140.
You do need to be able to put together Raspberry ‘parts’ together – it is actually easy the hardest part being installing the spacers and screws to keep the built unit from coming loose – no soldering at all is required.
This YouTube video give the necessary instructions on loading the software, etc. and the links to the necessary software.
The advantage of this solution vs a installing a Roon end point on a Raspberry pi, is that the HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro solution give both optical and digital output (at up to 192MHz, 24bit) which can be fed into any of the older Naim streamers.
I was able to use the Roon app on my table to stream to the Raspberry Pi connected to a NDX – and also stream Qobuz via the Roon app to the NDX
There is some software that you will need to download from the web (all free) – first to burn the PiCorePlayer software and a second app – app to identify the ip address of the Raspberry Pi to set the output to the digital outputs (vs the default analogue output) – I downloaded an app on my android phone for this. Both of these software was free.
Once I got all the neceaasry parts together, it took me about 1 hour from start to connecting the device to my NDX and playing music…
Soundwise - it very good. I understand that further improvements can be made by upgradig to a linear power supply for the Raspebrry Pi (need one that outputs 5V at 3A via a USB-C ) - looking around these cost more than the Raspberry bundles itself… I havent tried this upgrade myself yet.
Because the Naim streamers buffer the digitial input, I wonder how much improvement will be gained for the additional cost…
Happt to provide more details if anyone is interested…