Decided to re-do my Roon server. Throwing an actual 2018 model Intel NUC at it along with a LPS for the NUC. Curious to see what a good PS can bring to the table. Whether or not it’s going to make a difference, I don’t know. The Roon database will be on the main (M.2) drive, and the media files will be on the internal 1 TB SSD drive. One box solution with a clean power supply.
Yes, I can fit my entire active library on a 1TB drive, don’t laugh.
I’ll continue to do routine backups by copying the database and music library to an external SSD drive once a week.
I moved my Roon Core to a NUC last year and I don’t regret it at all. I went with a 2TB SSD for storage because I’m at about 850 GB and wanted room to grow.
I sort of flipped around the concept of backups, though. I manage my music library on my NAS. On my Windows PC, I have a Robocopy script that automatically syncs the library on the NAS to the internal drive on the Roon Core. Changes are replicated within 1-2 minutes so it’s near-real time.
The NAS is backing up to the Cloud in case of disaster (or I mistakenly delete something).
Not a Roon specific question but fuck it, I use Roon so I’m asking here. lol
Any experience out there whether it really makes a tangible difference what component sources the music file library or is it all simply preference?
I’m debating setting up my new NUC with a 2TB 2.5 SSD and keeping the music library there. The Roon DB will obviously still reside on the pri9mary M.2 C: drive where the OS is installed.
But figured I’d ask since I’m not really sure if there are any “best practice” guidelines out there.
I’m not the best person to answer this as I have not dabbled too far into this personally, but from what I have read from other people’s experiences, yes. It matters. There is a reason why there are $35k roon/music servers that are purpose built for this use case.
The NUC and roon rock setup is fine and very adequate for most people, and seems to be a great solution for someone who wants to take the next step past just running the core off their main pc.
For what’s its worth I did notice a bump in sound quality moving my core installation and music library off my main listening pc onto my Synology NAS.
If you aren’t using it as an endpoint there’s no direct connection, so it shouldn’t matter.
All the server is doing is putting bytes on the local network.
You could start arguing that the server is generating noise in the environment, but I refuse to believe that’s significant if you have any network isolation, either by using WiFi or an optical cable run.
FWIW I asked the Sonore guys if they claimed this, since they have an optical version of their passively cooled server, and he said it mad no difference, it was just an option.
Someone needs to explain to me how it’s possible, I get noise on the ethernet cable making it into a switch, and to the streamer, but that’s not possible with any sort of isolation, because the streamer isn’t connected to the switch.
And as a random datapoint, while I haven’t tried an audiophile Roon Core I have run it on 3 different PC’s everything from a an I3 to an I7 and AMD Ryzen, with and without video cards, memory between 4GB’s and 64GB’s, passively and actively cooled.
And while I didn’t A/B them, outside the actual noise level of the server I have never noticed a difference.
I like the one box solution and what I’ll wind up doing is turning off as many unnecessary services etc. I also disable all of the h/w in BIOS that’s not being used, turning off the built in sound card, even going as far as physically removing the blue tooth daughter card in my present server. This time I snagged a really good quality LPS I saw on US Audio Mart, just the Ghent cable alone I’m sure the guy paid $80 for. LOL So the PS propagated the move to a better quality box.
The problem I was chasing, (I think it was power related) I had a drive just go invisible to the OS, the file allocation table I guess corrupted and I wound up losing all of the medial library. I was using a USB enclosure with two HDs in it, and I think the USB connection may simply not have been enough juice to power the enclosure with both SSD drives in it. So that’s why I’m looking to just put the drive in the NUC since I can with it this time around.
I just don’t feel as capable or comfortable with non Windows OS so I just stick with what I know, but I think for now I’m “mentally” more at ease in the box I’ll be putting my Roon DB and library into.
Thank you for the communal sounding board everyone!
Sonically I heard no difference between running the Core on a Mac, PC, NAS or ROCK. The RAAT stream coming through the network is the same.
What I found moving from moving a desktop doing and user duties, to a NAS with limited services to a ROCK as a dedicated appliance is stability. Fewer dropouts, more consistent search performance, etc. It’s a stable and well-supported configuration. That matters to me.
Interesting story from this week related to Roon dropouts. I’ve wirelessly run Roon endpoints with no dropouts for a couple years now. Surprisingly robust protocol. This week I put an LED lighting controller on my wifi (probably not advisable…) and I started getting Roon dropouts. I had no idea for a few days what was causing it, but when I took the LED lighting controller off everything went back to normal. I don’t even want to think what it was doing to bog the network down to the point Roon couldn’t stream properly, but it’s off now!
Best practice is to have the entire music ecosystem on a separate network. I’ve never gone to that extreme but as I said, it’s best practice for us audio goobers.
I am this close to pulling the trigger on this setup. I just want to make sure that I don’t need anything that comes with the full version of SonicOrbitor which I don’t believe I do. I mean not an extra $400 worth anyway…
With the LPSU, SFPs and switch bundled
$ 1,157
I would be replacing the Pi + Allo DigiOne on the main HP rig and leaving my current Roon Core server as is for the moment - upgrading that later
Any other Roon users have issues with album art not displaying on remote displays? In the past I’ve been able to display album art on a TV connected via Chromecast with no issue. I’ve tried using the Web display and a Ropieee display as well, nothing is showing album artwork. On my laptop and phone where I’m controlling the playback do I see all of the artwork as usual. I’ve not tried to remotely display artwork in a while, so I have no idea what could have changed. So putting this out there to see if it’s a more common issue going on. I see some posts in the roon community similar to this, but nothing exactly like this.
I’ve go no experience but given the solution there, and depending on what you were ultimately looking for it may be better to go with separate components. You’re putting a lot of faith on the performance of both the streaming capability and the DDC capability of that one box.
Is your primary goal to introduce a fiber link to reduce Ethernet noise or is it to improve your Pi streamer?
Does an Apple TV endpoint count? I get album art in one of those. You could also just see if you use the web browser of your computer or phone and go to the Roon display IP address and see if that works.