I bit the bullet and bought a NUC10l7FNHN to migrate from a mini mac with a very large library and installed Rock successfully. It really seems to have addressed all the performance issues and works great with usb and airplay.
However, an unpleasant surprise is the HDMI output doesnt work. The audio options in Roon will not even display an HDMI output for the NUC; only the USB output is displayed.
I found other threads that discussed this being a later version of NUC10i7FNH (no N at the end) and the earlier version had intel hd audio support but the later version (with N) at the end does not and so the later version will not support hd audio. I just wanted ask if any solution has been identified for this, or if the only solution is find one of the earlier models?
Well i thought it was not recommended to install windows on a ROCK?
I think i can live without the hdmi output since the usb still seems to work for hi res music (i’m not techy enough to understand why that is!) and i would not often listen to multichannel music even though i do have some in my library (i assume Roon would convert to 2 channel in this case?)
It’s not a great situation though. Near as i can tell, you can really only buy the NUC 10 with the N suffix and older models can only be bought used and seem hard to find on ebay from what i can tell (and even then some risk the listing wont be correct about the suffix of the model). At the same time, the NUC 11 doesnt work on ROCK. It would be great to hear from the Roon team if they have any planned software updates that might address being able to use the HDMI on the NUC10 with N suffix or use the NUC 11
Intel says that “Intel HD AudioTechnology” is not included on this model, so I am not sure that using Windows and loading a driver manually will fix anything. Nor, if there is anything Roon can do to get around the Intel limitation.
A NUC is just a little computer, think of it as a laptop in a different form factor (sans keyboard and monitor). You can load any OS you want onto it, Windows, Linux, or RoonOS. ROCK is a RoonOS with RoonServer image. So, you would load EITHER Windows or RoonOS, not both.
I am assuming, the suggestion made above was to see if Windows loaded on that PC could output audio via HDMI. The result being if it could, then maybe there is something Roon could do, and, if it could not, then there would be no way for Roon to enable HDMI audio.