I run Roon on a Mac mini, but have been considering future dedicated hardware to run Roon ROCK. A key driver for me, at the moment, is memory leaks on macOS. I see degradation in responsiveness over a period of time e.g. Roon will start with 25MB and then jump to 425MB on initiation of first stream; it then progressively increases its memory footprint as more interaction and playing occurs. My last restart was when it hit 3GB.
There are other instances of this on the Roon forum, some going back a couple of years, and appears it hasn’t been fully resolved yet.
(And in terms of hardware for ROCK, I’m leaning more toward NUC than Nucleus at the moment. Funny how price can rear its head relative to Naim budgets , but I might actually enjoy the parts consideration and assembly for NUC.)
I’m a newcomer to Roon and currently use it on a 2008 vintage Mac Pro which has two Intel Xeon processors running 8 cores and 32 GB ram. The Roon software runs from the 1 TB SSD boot disk and the music library is on a 3 TB Sata disk in the machine. It seems to perform well and even playing DSD files has plenty of processing power.
I do love the functionality of Roon and my end points are Naim NDS, Muso and Muso QB first gen. Also have a Lindemann Bridge which is Roon ready and also a couple of Bluesound devices which are also Roon ready.
The important bit is that the sound quality from my NDS is extremely good and I’m hearing much more music, space between instruments etc. Higher resolution files and DSD files do seem to stand out a bit more in clarity, but a crap recording is a crap recording and I’ve plenty of those.
I think moving forward when the Mac Pro starts to die I will invest in a Vortexbox as I still have an awful lot of CDs yet to rip, mostly classical box sets.
Hi yes DSD itself takes not much processing power, it’s if you apply DSP functions to DSD or transcode it it can then be more resource consuming.
Also worth remembering Naim don’t send DSD to their actual DACs, they convert to PCM first… DSD to PCM is a lossy process, so if you are sending DSD to a Naim DAC/Streamer you will be hearing Naim’s ‘interpretation’ in their inbuilt transcoding software which is pretty good in my opinion.
However it can be worth comparing with Roon’s DSD transcoder built into their Core, albeit with first gen Naim streamers you are limited to 24 bits ample word size from Roon. The later streamers go to Roon 32 bit.
A key consideration with DSD is ultrasonic filtering to reduce audio intermodulation artefacts… unless you enjoy them of course …
Roon Rock on an Intel NUC motherboard placed in a fanless case powered by a fancy linear power supply (Teddy Pardo).
The last option was based on positive forum experiences.
For library management purposes I regularly swap from the Roon Core on my PC to the fancy and expensive Roon Rock on the fanless case.
The three options sound exactly the same, no perceptible change.
Which makes sense… but I like experimenting.
I now have a fancy, and very expensive, Roon Rock server
My advice for any Roon user would be : don’t spend money on the Roon Server.
Money is better spent on :
better streamer or Roon Endpoint (makes a huge difference)
sorting out the network (adds a valuable and noticeable difference)
@Joppe
In the context of your system I’d go for Roon Rock an intel NUC.
If you plan to place the Roon server in your listening room, I’d go for a Nucleus or NUC motherboard + fanless case (the standard NUC case can be quite noisy)
I ended up going for a Roon Rock i5 NUC in a fanless case. I already had 500gb PCIe m.2 drive, 1TB SSD for the NUC so I only needed to add NUC, Ram and the fanless case. If I had to buy it all, it would have still been less than a third of the cost of a Roon Nucleus (cheapest model)
However, I’d point out that I had to make a change as the processor on the QNAP 453 Pro NAS that I was using for the Roon Core was maxing out as the NAS isn’t just for music.
If whatever you are using now is managing ok (CPU wise) and you’re not bothered with having a dedicated silent 24/7 server then stay put. I didn’t notice any sound improvement, just speed improvement of using the app. Which is now very fast in terms of moving around the app and processing DSP features etc.
For me, in addition to the performance improvements, I now have a small box that I can take with me when I go away to self catering properties… just USB connection from the NUC to my M Scaler / TT2 and ethernet to the router and that’s it. Mobile headphone rig.
I did that, comparing a top QNAP fanless NAS to Nucleus+ which sounded better to my ears with a Seagate USB HDD compared to the better WD Red inside the QNAP. Fitting a pro SDD inside the Nucleus improved things further, with a bigger jump to follow when I powered it using a Sean Jacobs (Custom HiFi Cables) DC3+
Depends how far away. While I found little too difference in sound quality from moving from NAS to Roon NUC, I did experience an improvement when moving the NUC so it joined the Aries G1 on the Cisco 2960 switch.
Because of the noise of the NAS, there was no way I’d want it in the same room but as the NUC is silent, it made sense to attach it to the Cisco rather being on a different standard switch on the other side of the house.
As @Michaelb and @ChrisSU suggested you want to keep your computer, NAS, switch, etc. all your noisy stuff, away from your delicate and sensible analog gear.
I’ve been thinking about building a NUC to run Roon ROCK for some time but since my old Mac Mini still runs Roon well having plenty of processor and memory ‘headroom’ I suspect I’ll not do this. (Mac Mini’s current ‘uptime’ is 19 days and 23 hours so I’m certainly not suffering from the memory leaks @mook has seen)
Unless, of course, I get bored and decide that it makes sense to build a NUC for whatever reason…
I think you’d be right to keep to the mini… if the CPU and memory etc are sufficient and its not being run in the same room as the system then the money would be better used/saved elsewhere
Hi, Thanks for sharing your Rock am Core experiences!
May I ask if you run your Roon Rock NUC on the last switch together with the streamer?
How much noise can one expect from a nuc (with fan), my Mac book is completely silent running Roon core? Is a fan less case really required if on only have moderate library and don’t use DSP etc.
I think this is good general advice!
My problem is that I clearly prefer a switch before my streamer. I also found that using streaming cables can make a difference, my choice was Chord Signature. I have a 3m and a 1m. So I can get some distance to the the server. How do you solve this? Long cable to streamer?
My MacPro has been up 58 days and counting and working fine with Roon Core, plus a myriad of other applications. Certainly no obvious resources being leaked… that would become obvious very quickly. Roon is used daily, and my library has 23,824 tracks.
I would be careful about not assuming any sort of signal processing (DSP is certainly not all about room correction) , it will cripple your use potentially.
Different end points can require optimising such as headphones, and Roon has inbuilt the Audeze profiles for example, and then there is the active loudness capability that can be useful when playing playlists, that ensures tracks are consistent with each other.
Finally there is the peak level adjustment where subtracting a few dB can help badly produced tracks clipping with certain DACs in the reconstruction filtering… these are all potential options and benefits in using Roon in certain scenarios to add musical enjoyment and flexibility, and having a Core that is unable to provide this to be would be a false economy and really missing a key value in using Roon.
On the network switch(s) supporting Roon, best ensure those switch(s) supports IGMP snooping, so as to prevent the Roon groups broadcasting over your home network/wifi where they are not needed.
I bought an Akasa Newton case. There are different ones based on the NUC you buy so don’t just by anyone. Use the intel nuc name as part of any search.
Forr example intel NUC7i5BNH. They go for about £60 mark
I agree… it’s what really put the final nail in the coffin for my NAS drive running the core. It would be running real nice and then you add a filter and the cpu usage would jump. The menu interface on the app became very sluggish so I needed a new solution that would last.
The i5 gen 7 seems to be the sweet spot for NUCs at the moment based on price/power ratio. If I’d kept an old Mac mini that would have been ideal as well… if kept out of the room.
, but I might actually enjoy the parts consideration and assembly for NUC.)
