No bandwidth issues. I’m runnning gigabit backbone. The i5 NUC is incredibly fast, 256gb SSD and 8gb of ddr4 ram. Running ubuntu server. So far exceeded my expectations. Very quiet, low noise floor. Next up is regen on USB.
Using iPad as controller.
Just for the record, I’m thinking I will rebuild my NUC now running Win 10 with a LINUX distribution.
First there is the overhead of all those Windows services a Roon Core does not need. I’ve disabled so many. But there is still a massive number of useless things that are running. Plus, the loss of control over how Windows Updates itself. I had a friend over for a music session Saturday, and the behaviour of the Win 10 OS deciding it would apply updates right then and causing my music to stop countless times, pissed me the hell off.
Let alone I’ve lost all confidence in Microsoft updates. The possibility of problems is so much higher now that they got rid of their substantial QA staff that used to test on heterogeneous systems. To now doing mainly automated tests on more homogeneous VMs, and relying on customers to find bugs for them.
I went from a Windows 10 Pro device (HP mini PC) connected to the DAC via USB, then after a couple of years of this I installed a streamer with USB output to the DAC and moved the Windows 10 PC to my office room and away from my Hi-Fi rack. This was an improvement because I got rid of the noisy electronics which always bothered me…
Finally after my little HP PC started having fan issues, I replaced it with a NUC running the Roon ROCK, what I was surprised to find is a much improved sound quality, apparently according to Roon engineers the improved performance of the new NUC (the ROCK build uses minimal system resources) contributed to the improvement in sound quality due to improved timing… Go figure… It worked for me, very simple, clean, hassle free…
I lost some of the power I had with Windows (I had JRiver also on that machine, could used it to test other things) but I am happier now with the new setup.