Hi guys,
I’m wondering if this will work, first picture indicates a very common way of hooking up the set up, however if I get a rock server with 2 LAN port, one connects to router another to the bridge, is it going to work?
The reason of doing this is I’m curious if it will make an audio quality difference by direct streaming to the bridge.
Thank you in advance🙏
Regards
Ben
It is very unlikely that you would be able to get it to work with Roon OS (as installed by ROCK).
If you did this the simple way (no bridging) then you will probably have no way of assigning the ip address of the ethernet port on the NUC running Roon OS that is connected to the bridge (unless you put a DHCP server in the bridge - which would be possible only with bridges running a fairly complete version of linux like a Raspberry Pi). This would result in two separate networks on different subnets which is a configuration that Roon do not support.
It may be possible if, instead of using ROCK, you installed a full linux distribution on the NUC (or whatever it is that you installed using ROCK) and then configured the the NUC to bridge the two networks. I don’t really know though because I do not have any experience of doing that. Even if you did get it to work, it would definitely be an unsupported network configuration.
Also, configuring the NUC to act as a network bridge will also mean that the broadcast traffic is not reduced anyway - all you will have done is increase the amount of work that the NUC has to do to handle the broadcast traffic. From the Roon Bridges point of view, in respect of the traffic seen, the two networks would appear to be identical - although topologically different.
Even if you did this, I don’t think that you would see any noticeable difference in audio quality. Ethernet (using CAT 5, 6 or 6a cables - not CAT 7 or 8) provides galvanic isolation between connected devices so, since the traffic on the network is the same, I can’t see any mechanism whereby audio quality could be changed - either for the better or for the worse.
There is a post from a VERY long time ago where someone did a dual ethernet setup (with help from Danny).
You need a USB ethernet adapter which ROCK supports (I don’t think roon say which ones work)…
There is also a question about whether it still works - and if so whether it would be supported going forward.
But, since network topology cannot influence SQ, it would be a futile effort, even if it worked.
Thanks very much for the input, very informative 
I use an Antipodes server which has a direct stream port. This I direct connect to my player(streamer). I hear a definite sound improvement using this direct stream to moving the player elsewhere on the network. ymmv
mmiz (my mileage is zero)
It’s not zero, it’s sqrt(-1) * N where N is the price of the server.
What OS is it on the antipodes when using Roon?
I suspect you install Roon server in a linux system will have much higher chance of success. As it will be much more flexible if you have adequate IT skills.
It is a linux variant.
Right, but ROCK doesn’t allow use to tweak anything. Besides, the sound from Rock is not that best of Roon. Server to me.
