Uhh. Dropping WiFi would be really bad in my case as I control my ROCK via WiFi only. I never had serious network issues and streaming the audio to my Apple devices works well. But my main use case is to control the NUC which holds all the files and drives my speakers.
I didn’t know that WiFi is not supported on every NUC so I’m glad, I accidentally got the right one. If ROCK 2 will be wired only it makes it useless for me. I can’t connect my NUC with my Router via Cable as I’m not allowed to drill through the walls in my apartment.
Could always use a velop or eero or one of those WiFi mesh setups and hardwire the nuc to it. Not cost effective but your WiFi network would be great and you nuc would have network access via its Ethernet port via WiFi
Thanks for the suggestions. I have an AirPort Express, but it consumes 4 Watts. I don’t want to mess my power efficient setup with this device. Then being a Linux administrator would be the better choice. But that’s not what I bought Roon for. Will future Roon versions run on older Roon OS?
I recall Roon (and my personal experience) that Apple Airports are the worst of the lot when it comes to Roon’s network performance needs. Its explicitly NOT recommended in Roon’s networking best practices!
EtherNet over Power is up there with the worst setups too. MOCA might be a little better, but a Cat6 is always the desired connection.
Hmm. I’m a bit confused. How does it help connecting ROCK via cable to the router if I stream to an iPad or control Roon with that iPad? The communication between ROCK and the iPad is using WiFi in any way. I have no endpoint with a LAN connection. Even my MacBook doesn’t have LAN (without dongles). WiFi works well in my case, so the cable thing seems to bring no improvement in my setup. But maybe I misunderstood something or I am one of the few persons which use Roon like that.
this is true of both the Apple Airport and WiFi for the Core.
In the recommended scenario: TIDAL → ROCK goes over ethernet, and then ROCK → iPad goes over WiFi.
If ROCK was on WiFi, then the TIDAL traffic also goes over WiFi. If the music was files on a NAS, those would also go over WiFi. If the file was high-res but your iPad’s output was not capable of hi-res, your Qobuz/NAS->ROCK would be high res, but it’s get downsampled to be more reasonable by the Core, so ROCK → iPad would be non-hires.
There are many more scenarios where putting the Roon Core on WiFi is bad vs it being OK. Our recommendations are meant to help the majority of installs. If you manage to get WiFi to work, more power to you, but we can not give advice based on non-normal scenarios. Our advice is designed to have the most number of installs have the least number of problems.
Thanks for the explanation. Until now I thought I’m mainstream as I don’t have/listen to highres music. But in the Roon world I seem to be exotic.
My WiFi-Setup isn’t tuned or very special. I’ve an quite old router (Fritbox 7490) and it’s placed where it’s not ugly and not where it performs best. But I never tried to optimise it as I haven’t discovered a bottleneck. I even have no problems when another person is streaming a 4K movie and I stream Tidal through Roon. But I only use 320kbps for Tidal so that’s peanuts compared to the video.
BTW. Doesn’t Roon buffer the stuff from Tidal or a NAS, so it shouldn’t be a big thing? Or is the problem that Roon doesn’t throttle the downloads/streams so they decrease the bandwidth for RAAT more than necessary?
If you have a Fritz!Box 7490, have you thought about setting up a Mesh using the Fritz repeaters? The 7490 supports a Fritz Mesh, despite being an older product.
I have a Fritz mesh setup here at home with three Fritz repeaters and a 7530 router, and it’s rock-solid.
Thanks for the tip. The smallest Fritz Repeater 600 consumes around 2 Watt which is much more efficient than an AirPort Express. But compared to an HomePod mini which consumes 1,28 Watt für WiFi and music playback it looks very inefficient.
So I wait some years for more efficient devices until Roon forces me to use such a device intensive setup. For now I’m fine with my non-recommended WiFi-only setup.
But in the Roon world I seem to be exotic. 
