This is about a wish and your ability to turn it into reality. And that’s all what counts. So Doug, congratulations to you and keep good care of your new silicon baby!
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Given Roons love of memory leaks the more the better. I need to test M1 work MacBook Pro editing in Roon as using windows or a phone even after a short time it starts to slow down immensly. My core is on ROCK but editing a big number of albums on any remore thus far (not used my work mac for it yet) seems to make the remote app grind to a halt and it needs restarting, likely a memory issue.
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Bugs are another story. Even there though Apple’s, memory architecture can help. Does seem a bit crazy to buy a 16 gig machine to give yourself eight additional gigs of room for memory leaks.
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Thanks very much. I don’t feel too abused on this thread. 
Of course, everything you say about unified memory and the way Macs handle swapping is on the money. And it comports with my experience, mostly. (I did have an exchange with another user on here recently who said that with 100K+ tracks, the M1 gobbled up RAM). System monitor currently shows all Roon processes using up about 2GB of RAM. I envision the day my library will go to well beyond the 15K tracks I currently have.
The calculus here for me was:
- I’m going to have a dedicated computer just for a core. No multiuse.
- I had been willing to spend $2500 on one
- The top-shelf Mini M2 was half that
To a certain degree, I talked myself into over-spec’ing (sic).
However, the scenario you offered at the end is a real possibility. I may opt to use the M2 Pro for my work and wait on replacing my core til my current Mac Mini just can’t hold up. I’ll for sure keep my options open during the 15 day Apple return window.
I appreciate the thoughtful advice!
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Mine runs with no monitor at all. It does need to be connected to one for setup but my HDMI port is unused
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I think your wise to go with more, if your planning on a large library, dont think Roon is very efficient with its memory allocation. As I know from just editing my Roon library and that was just removing versions.
I also have that idea, but I wonder when that is going to happen. I’ve seen users replacing minis not because of performance but because roon would not work anymore on that osx.
Yeah I felt at $1299 it wasn’t too crazy
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Yeah I am sure I would have a lot of life left in this current Mac. This is clearly an optional move on my part.
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That’s strange because I my Mac mini M1 runs 4K when connected to remotely from another Mac via screen sharing 
Thanks for the update… perhaps you don’t need this dongle anymore after all…
I have all set to lowest, but how do you check for that (rez)?
You can see it clear 
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I have set up a NUC ROCK. I am firmly in the MAC ecosystem but I’m also very confident/familiar with linux. Turns out the ROCK isn’t really linux from a human interaction standpoint. It’s more like your toaster. Set it up and it works.
Not criticizing your choice at all, the mini will serve your purpose just fine. Just saying for those evaluating: don’t be scared by the Linux thing. You don’t see it at all. It is truly an appliance.
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I like the idea of the M2 Pro Mac Mini. I was running my Roon Core on a Dual Xeon 16 Core server with 128GB of RAM nvme ssds etc. It was great for a long time but I recently replaced it with a NUC12 Extreme I9 which was way more responsive and uses way less CPU on Roon DSP and Upsampling.
The only reason for upgrading was Wife Acceptance Factor but I got a big improvement in performance. I will probably try Running ROCK on the NUC12 Extreme just to see what difference it makes.
Regards Andrew
This is a pretty good way of looking at it to encourage people put off by a lack Linux experience. It’s also not like Linux if you want to get your hands dirty and tweak. If that’s your aim ROCK’s got very few ways in, by design. For some it’s a turnkey appliance, it leaves me feeling I’ve been locked out …
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Here’s the update:
I have the machine up and running.
I’m simultaneously streaming to twelve zones at once. No grouping. I have DSP turned on for all of them, 2x upsampling when I can, headroom management enabled and volume leveling (Auto) enabled, Parametric EQ with one preset enabled.
I tried to push it as much as I could.
“Processor Speed” on the various zones ranges from 10.9x (slowest) to 93.1 (fastest). One of the zones has no “Processor Speed” at all - it’s just handling it.
I am switching between these as best I can (they are all over the house) and I am hearing no glitches or problems at all.
The Mac Mini itself remains silent and as cool to the touch as if it was off.
I don’t have anyway to mess around with DSD so I can’t test that for you. Some of these zones are very definitely “low quality” because they have to resort to routing audio through the OS.
Activity monitor shows CPU at about 95% usage, but I really don’t know how many cores it is using. I would assume that is 95% of just one core and others are available for other apps. (I don’t run any other apps besides time machine, which WAS running while this test is taking place)
Memory usage at this point is about 1.5GB. Memory pressure is very green and the machine is in no trouble at all (16GB)
Next thing I will try is loading up a crazy amount of tracks into my library and see how it fares. Currently at 15,000 or so. I don’t know if I have time but I’ll try to (temporarily) add up to 100K from Tidal/Qobuz. That may be a little ambitious.
None of this is scientific I realize, and I can’t tell you if you really want to spend $1299 on one of these like I did.
But it sure seems like I’m stress testing it pretty hard and it’s having, essentially, no effect on the machine. It’s happy to do it.
LATER THAT SAME NIGHT….I got her up to almost 80,000 tracks (in one night!) before I just ran out of time to add any more. the machine’s memory usage remained below 3 - 4 GB
TL;DR it’s faster and more powerful than anything I could ever possibly need for a roon core.
It’s officially overkill 
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Hi Doug
Thanks for your post. Sounds like you have fun, so enjoy.
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I think you see different processing speed number because M1 & M2 Mac’s have performance and efficiency cores.
So faster cores for demanding tasks and slower cores for background tasks. Playing on a zone without upsampling might as well be categorised as less demanding task.
And not sure if roon takes advantage of the GPU. (HQPlayer doesn’t)
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Congratulations. Enjoy your new powerhouse Roon core.
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