I use an old Mac mini with SSD running Roon Core today but ever since I emailed smallgreencomputer (SonicTransporter i5) and they stated the below I’ve wondered how much the hardware which runs Roon Core actually do to the overall sound performance. Anyone have first hand experience in if the hardware Roon core runs on affect the sound performance? Have had my eyes on the latest Nucleus One but also think about moving to a used mac mini M2 which is roughly the same price.
Roon runs much faster on a dedicated box than it does on a general purpose computer with a desktop operating system. This improves the sound.
It’s also easier to manage as you don’t need to worry about OSX upgrades. On top of that, you get a lot more features such as the UPnP bridge.
It’s a combination of both hardware and software. If you know what you are doing, it’s straightforward to build a slimmed down computer in both hardware and software.
You can also fiddle with power supplies to your hearts content; but for roon the simplest solution is an off the shelf intel nuc running rock os. The nuc itself is a general purpose computer, you could potentially use it as an everyday computer for internet, word processing etc but suits itself very well as a device for roon server. Rock os is basically a variant of Linux, with the unnecessary bits taken out so it can run roon server and that’s it.
You can buy a nucleus or roll your own for about £350 which is roughly what I paid a year or so ago to make my roon nuc.
2 years ago, £375 for the nuc, 8 gig memory, 250 gig nvme ssd.
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I run mine on a modern mac m3 laptop with wifi. Thats plenty of oomph in my network setup and the laptop can multitask. I found that much better (more stable) than a dedicated i5 hp desktop machine. I was getting drop outs on the hp machine.
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Thanks! As I understand it it’s not that much about CPU power. There is a lot going on in standard computer vs a Roon core made hardware. My old Mac mini is not slow or interrupts playback etc.
Cpu/gpu if you do any dsp.
Otherwise not too much of a cpu load. I can easily multi-task on modern (last3- 5 years) cpus if plenty of ram and ssd even running dsp. I suspect I had network card issue on my hp. Its basically the same software running if its dedicated machine or general purpose machine.