I usually use roon with direct connect DAC (Shiit) and head phones (Sennheiser) but every so often I feel the need to fire up my really loud old school Parasound HCA 2200II system connected via a Marantz HD-DAC-1. Not exactly cutting edge but really sounds great at club SPL levels. I’ve tried both win and linux distro’s running the various roon things but inevitably run into the problem of said system being off-line for periods of time and subsequently having to deal with auth, os updates, disk indexing, inherited desktop os latency, blah blah… detracts from my enjoyment. I’d rather have a setup where when I opt to use a system across a network, doing so does not require any kind of endpoint related activity requiring user input. Having a win or linux desktop node sitting out there kind of sucks in that regard.
What is the most trouble free turn-key roon bridge solution you know about that operates more like an appliance than an os? I could go the the DIY route but, alas, I don’t want to clutter my music enjoyment with doing what I do during my day job. I have been doing software development for, like, ever and more and more I find that the last thing I want to do is color a pleasurable facet of my life with tech (adult onset Ludditism?) .
The philosophy of RoPieee is to be an appliance, with no Linux experience required. The “DIY” portion is the download of the software onto a SD card, and perhaps physically attaching a HAT to a Raspberry Pi and installing all in a case. It is minimal, but > 0 effort. Afterwards “it just works” in most cases.
In Canada, the cost is approx. 125 CAD depending on the HAT, case, SD card, and power supply selected.
You can buy it in DIY kit or fully assembled. It has an awesome DAC HAT and can also serve as a Roonbridge headphone amp. I’ve been running them now for a few months and have had absolutely no problems. I’m running Ropieee which auto-updates.