Will HQplayer be supported ? And if yes do you think will improve the playback quality ?
The spec says it runs the standard Roon Server. It is a headless machine with no graphics capability so it cannot run HQPlayer as well but should be able to hand HQPlayer off to another machine as normal.
I am not sure what you mean when you say “hand HQ Player off to another machine.” How would that be set up?
You have a second PC running Windows and HQPlayer. You set ROCK up to send music to HQPlayer across the network.
Thanks Henry but doesn’t that defeat the purpose of Rock which is to eliminate the Windows or MAC OS system? If you have to use another computer with Windows, it seems that it would be preferable just to use the Windows OS and run HQ Player on it. Eventually the Roon upsampling will be probably improve to the extent that HQ Player is not needed and I could switch over to Rock.
I am planning on purchasing the NUC Skull Canyon (with the fanless case) so I can run Rock in the future.
ROCK does what it says on the box, and Roon is by no means symbiotic with HQPlayer. If you have a preference for HQPlayer then you are stuck with its limitations I suppose and Roon will never go to the really heavy stuff HQPlayer can do so it may well always have a place in some systems. But if you don’t have a huge collection and won’t use DSP, you could potentially use a Pentium or Celeron system for ROCK and if you want the assurance of full support an i3 NUC is very good value.
Skull Canyon isn’t supported. You would need to speak to the users of that platform to see how well that is performing for them with ROCK.
I’d love to hear from someone at Roon directly that Skull Canyon isn’t actually supported. Given that NUC6i3XXX and NUC6i5XXX are supported, it seems odd that NUC6i7XXX wouldn’t be, though I acknowledge that it isn’t on their list of supported NUCs.
On the other hand, given the other features of Skull Candy, it might make sense to make it a Windows box rather than ROCK anyway. I need a box that will deliver multichannel to my pre/pro over HDMI.
We do not guarantee that it works, or works well. It may and I think some have reported that it works well, but the NUC6i7 is a weird beast, totally different than the others in the NUC line (for one, it is a quad core).
Getting one is at your own risk. Same for aftermarket cases.
ROCK can do that on the NUCs we list on our kb site.
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@danny I guess my real question then is whether I should do ROCK in the first place. Right now, I’m running Roon Server on a MacMini and it seems to work fine. The Mini does have one other function: I use it to play FilmStruck and Tribeca Shortlist on my TV (two video services for which there’s no app on my Smart TV). Both of those services are now available on Roku so I could ditch the Mini and get a stand alone ROCK box. But other than being a stand-alone Roon-only appliance, I’m not sure what the advantage of a ROCK box is. Is it more stable or have better sound quality? Is there something else?
I switched from running Roon on my Mini to RoonServer because it started automatically on a reboot of the mini unlike the Roon application, but in truth, I wish I had the Roon app back because I miss having the screensaver up on my TV when music is playing. I’m setting up a new system when I move in September and I’d like to figure out the plusses and minuses of each of the following 5 scenarios:
- ROCK on a NUC
- Roon app on a MacMini
- RoonServer on a MacMini
- Roon on a Skull Canyon box running Windows 10
- RoonServer on a Skull Canyon box running Windows 10
I am currently an all-Mac household but I’ve heard that Skull Canyon is really awesome for playing movies and I want to experiment with doing that with some ripped BluRays using Jriver. so I’m considering the leap to Windows on this one machine. Whetever box I have, would be headless and if it isn’t a ROCK box, I’d control it with LogMeIn.