Robert
Tapehead
I've blown hot and cold with Roon.
Appreciate the slick interface, feature set and information mining but always felt the pricing was bit toppy and I also had some intermittent performance issues - app freezing, glitches, slowdowns.
In the past I had the Roon Core (aka the server) and the Roon app/remote running on the same machine, a Microsoft Surface 7, which on paper is up to the job with a Core i5 and 8gb of ram. However running the Core on the Surface meant that everything was wireless, not just the various endpoints. This coupled with the loads on the fanless Surface was I suspect giving the less than stellar performance.
TBF a few forum members had advised not to run Core and App on the same laptop, notably AndyU.
I recently updated my main PC to 11th gen Intel NUC which left my old 8th gen going spare.
For some time now I've used Akasa fanless cases for my NUCs and these work very well, so I decided to install Roon ROCK (the Core) on the old NUC - still a powerful little box using 8th gen i7, 32gb ram (way overkill - you need 4!) and a 256gb SATA SSD drive for the system drive with a 1TB nvme for the library drive.
Anyway, installing Roon ROCK was a breeze and everything worked perfectly. You need to download and install codes but the process was easy. ROCK is a tiny Linux install dedicated to running the audio server.
It runs headless of course with nothing connected to the unit other than power and ethernet.
You access the unit via a web interface. Boot time is about 15 seconds, so you don't have to leave it running when not in use.
Superfast, no glitches and I can run as many lossless streams as I wish without issue.
In the images below you can see a photo of the Akasa case, which I recommend for any NUC PC, and three different steams playing on a Surface, Pixelbook and Pixel phone (Windows, Chrome OS, Android).
So if you want to try Roon I strongly recommend running the core (ROCK) on its own PC with an ethernet connection, you get a far better experience.
20210418_133255 by Rob Holt, on Flickr
finpge by Rob Holt, on Flickr
Appreciate the slick interface, feature set and information mining but always felt the pricing was bit toppy and I also had some intermittent performance issues - app freezing, glitches, slowdowns.
In the past I had the Roon Core (aka the server) and the Roon app/remote running on the same machine, a Microsoft Surface 7, which on paper is up to the job with a Core i5 and 8gb of ram. However running the Core on the Surface meant that everything was wireless, not just the various endpoints. This coupled with the loads on the fanless Surface was I suspect giving the less than stellar performance.
TBF a few forum members had advised not to run Core and App on the same laptop, notably AndyU.
I recently updated my main PC to 11th gen Intel NUC which left my old 8th gen going spare.
For some time now I've used Akasa fanless cases for my NUCs and these work very well, so I decided to install Roon ROCK (the Core) on the old NUC - still a powerful little box using 8th gen i7, 32gb ram (way overkill - you need 4!) and a 256gb SATA SSD drive for the system drive with a 1TB nvme for the library drive.
Anyway, installing Roon ROCK was a breeze and everything worked perfectly. You need to download and install codes but the process was easy. ROCK is a tiny Linux install dedicated to running the audio server.
It runs headless of course with nothing connected to the unit other than power and ethernet.
You access the unit via a web interface. Boot time is about 15 seconds, so you don't have to leave it running when not in use.
Superfast, no glitches and I can run as many lossless streams as I wish without issue.
In the images below you can see a photo of the Akasa case, which I recommend for any NUC PC, and three different steams playing on a Surface, Pixelbook and Pixel phone (Windows, Chrome OS, Android).
So if you want to try Roon I strongly recommend running the core (ROCK) on its own PC with an ethernet connection, you get a far better experience.
20210418_133255 by Rob Holt, on Flickr
finpge by Rob Holt, on Flickr