Wondering when there might be Roon Bridge available for ARMv6? I had posted this somewhere else and I guess it might not have been noticed?
Thanks
Bob
Doubt it’ll happen albeit ARMv8 is on the roadmap somewhere.
And how is that an improvement? There are some sonic advantages IMO to using an ARMv6 PI. I hope they can release a version. Should not be that difficult.
I’m a customer, just like you…I’m not possessed of any inside knowledge re what Roon’s plans are - I’d just be surprised if effort were expended packaging Roon Bridge for a legacy platform. What would the sonic advantages be?
I have been doing some experimenting and the ArmV6 boards like the A+ or Zero use much less power and have less stuff onboard. I initially noticed someone on another board using a PI Zero, so I asked, and it makes sense. I took it a bit further and if you look at all the PIs the SOC have only one USB port, the 2s, 3s etc stack a USB hub and then an Ethernet port. I think a more direct path should be better. I am currently running a fiber to USB convertor directly to an A+. No extra Ethernet transceivers or convertors. Just put it together so I have to put some more time into listening, but so far it is very good. With Picore Player the single core running at 700mhz uses about 2% cpu.
An arm based device running Roon Bridge typically has very little going on if all its running is a lightweight Linux distro and for some you can explicitly disable hardware components not needed e.g. video support, HDMI etc. (see ODROID).
Personally I think there are much bigger fish to fry in chasing sound quality than worrying about differences between levels of electrical noise in ARMv6/7/8 architectures.
I’m going to get myself some Sennheiser HD800’s coupled with a neutral HP amp soon, and even with them I’m not expecting to hear anything of significance between ARM based Roon Bridge endpoints.