When I was researching multichannel endpoints a month or 2 ago, I didn’t stumble across any specific HW/OS recommendations for Roon Bridge. So I’d be interested to hear if the folks at Roon have any official advice for Roon Bridge as well (similar to their NUC HW recommendations.)
The closest info I found during my search was from Roon’s CTO:
This convinced me to give a low power, Atom-based PC a try. From my experience, I can confirm that Roon Bridge is not HW intensive. With it running idle, the CPU utilization was only 2-3%. With multichannel audio, that jumped to about 15-20%. My solution has been stable so far, but it’s only been a month so long-term reliability is still a question for me.
From an OS perspective, it seems problems with multi-channel might be limited to Linux. I’m not sure if that’s limited to the specialized Linux OS’s like RoPiee/DietPi or extends to full Linux installs as well. I don’t remember seeing any reports of issues with multichannel on Mac OS or Windows. Hopefully, someone more knowledgeable than me can maybe provide you with a list of current OS’s that are multichannel compatible, though.
I don’t want to make Roon multi-channel set-up sound more difficult than it is, though. You really just need:
- An OS that supports multi-channel audio and Roon Bridge (Mac OS and Windows seem to be confirmed, Linux seems to depend on the version)
- Stable HW capable of running that OS
What’s “best” will probably be an individual decision based on the products we trust and are most comfortable using. I do kind of wish there was an “off the shelf” Roon Bridge appliance we could just buy from Roon (similar to a Nucleus), though. I know I would have bought one.
Hope this helps.