Happy with SQ for sure. NAS, NUC, and endpoints all wired with cat 6 with an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter PoE router and Netgear ProSafe 1Gb switches. Music is stored as FLAC at various rates/depths from 44.1/16 (majority) to 192/24 on a Synology NAS. This is accessed as a watched folder from Roon Core on the NUC. Two endpoints: Sonore microRendu+Teddy Pardo LPS>Schiit Bifrost Multibit>Schiit Asgard 2>MrSpeakers Ether C Flow and Sonore Sonicorbiter SE>Bel Canto mLink>Bel Canto C7R>KEF Reference 1+REL T7I.
Most of the conversation Iāve read about āoptimized for audioā servers is for the case where the DAC is connected directly to the server via USB or S/PDIF, where there are potential issues with noise and sample timing caused by the physical (electrical or optical) direct connection from the server to the DAC. Of course these issues may also arise between a Roon endpoint and its DAC. But a Roon server connected to Roon endpoints by Ethernet just needs to be powerful enough to keep up with user interaction and to do whatever processing needed to send RAAT packets reliably to the endpoints when asked by the endpoints. The NUC I have is plenty for that, load avg rarely goes above .2 when serving music. The Sonic Transporter is a nice all-in-one, easy to set up and use server, but thereās no reason it differ from the NUC in SQ. At least no reason I can discern, with several decades of professional experience in computing. I also suspect that some of the claims about server SQ effects are really caused by misconfigured server software doing unexpected transcoding.
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I answered my own question about a second after I posted it, but thanks anyway for your help
Its built now just need to wait until I get somewhere tomorrow with a decent broadband 260Mbit/s against my measly <1Mbit/s. I can active my MBP as the core and make the NUC the core, point it to my NAS and wait for the metadata to get acquired.
Hope to play with it tomorrow night 
Lubuntu maybe a good option if your looking for something light weight
Ok had a play and encountered some problems.
- Canāt see the screen using DisplayPort.
- Canāt get the NUC to mount my media folder on my NAS.
- The remote can see the core on the NUC.
Has anybody else experienced these problems please
Donāt know about 1. For 2, you donāt need to mount the NAS media folder on the NUC directly, you just need to point Roon Core to the media folder, by using Settings on a Remote. Iām not sure what problem you have in 3. Did you mean ācanāt seeā? Have you checked that the NUC and the device running Remote are in the same subnet?
Hi
The screen issue has been resolved with a DP to HDMI adapter.
All is working OK now and I am very impressed with the NUC and Linux.
SQ is very good, I am finding it to be more open and detailed from the previous sound on the Macbook.
Just for clarity. I finally got it working by having my media on a local storage device.
When I originally pointed the core to the media folder on the NAS, i couldnāt get it work and it kept coming back with a message alluding to their being a problem with mounting the folder
I just replaced my NAS from an old and slow Synology model with 2.5in drives to a newer, faster one with 3.5in drives. Somehow, I wasnāt able to get Roon Core to mount the NAS music folder using a low-privilege user with read-only access, only with a ānormalā user with RW access to the folder. Wonāt be able to figure it out until I dig through logs and turn on various debug flags. Yech.
I just tried again and I am trying to watch smb://DS415play/Sooloos Export and i get the error message.
mount error: could not resolve address for DS415play: unknown error
Hi Martin,
If you have used the hostname (DS415play) of your synology before, try it to add the share by entering the IP address instead. Then it does not need to be resolved (if that was meant by the error message)ā¦
It worked ok when my core was the Mac. I will definitely give the IP address a go. Cheers.
Linux does not see the special host naming magic that Apple uses and Synology also implements AFAIK. Linux could only see the NAS name if the name were it your (local) DNS.