I’ve just pressed “buy” on a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 with i5 and 16GB RAM to run headless. I’m planning to start running Roon Core on Windows, as my Linux skills are a tad rusty.
I have a relatively small collection of 20,000 tracks streaming to a bunch of Chromecast Audios and a few Google Nest speakers. I’ve got mesh WiFi and am planning to hang the Core unit off the basement mesh using wired ethernet.
Maybe someday I’ll upgrade my speakers but for now, this is mostly about the usability of the Roon interface, particularly for my wife.
Update: The machine came yesterday and everything was up and running by last night. I’d previously been running the trial on a shared all-in-one and it worked well, with some hiccups because it was only connected via Wi-Fi. Wiring this machine off one of the mesh routers seems to have addressed that issue.
Now it’s time to tweak the zones and settings and then explain how to use it to my wife. I decided to go this route as casting to Google speakers from YouTube Music was just unreliable enough so my wife would never use it. I’m hopeful she’ll like the capability to control from computer or phone or tablet (and finally have a real use for that Android tablet we were gifted a couple years ago.)
Do you have issues with dropouts when you’re casting to multiple speakers? My setup is rock solid when I stream to a single Nest speaker pair or Nest Mini speaker pair, but when I try to stream to a larger zone (Chromecast Audio speaker in living room and Nest Speaker Pair in Kitchen) it is much less reliable than simply casting from Plex or YouTube Music.
FWIW, casting two different streams to two different targets seems to work without issue, too.
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
6
No, not really. I do cast to all the speakers sometimes (5 minis), kind of a whole-house thing, but I’ve never seen issues with it. I usually use local music. Haven’t tried the stereo pairing.
Thanks. I thought perhaps the Google Mesh was having trouble, so I picked up a Netgear NIghthawk mesh to swap out. What a disaster. It went back to Costco the next morning after I spent two hours trying to get it up and running. Every configuration change required a network-wide reboot and the perfomance was abysmal.
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
8
I’m actually using an old Netgear Nighthawk. Not mesh, though.
So updated the Google Nest Mesh to an Orbi WiFi 6 mesh after doing some investigation. Seems that the Orbi has a dedicated channel for backhaul. That seems to have addressed 90% of the dropouts. Streaming last night for 3+ hours I only noticed a couple of issues.
Hey Bill I just got the Google Nest Speakers I can connect thru my Roon to each of them but cannot find the Group icon to put them all together. I sent another post on this earlier but since you have the Google speakers maybe you could help. Thanks
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
12
You need to use the Google Home app to group the speakers, not Roon.
Not mesh, though.