I didn’t skimp on investment either, but I sure made some investment mistakes along the way.
Ahhh. We all have.
But decent music at home is PRICELESS!
Whoaaa, that was a great time!!! Doing lot of BS. I was doing it too …
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An Yggdrasil!? Quick, you need to go out and buy a Topping DAC, now! 
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Another of my hobbies is to maintain a “homelab” computer and networking infrastructure. My career is/was in IT and networking technologies and I’ve always enjoyed experimenting and pushing the boundaries of infrastructure and high performance computing for enjoyment and career development.
So I have a closet full of servers, virtual machines, and networking gear to sustain my home automation and connectivity needs. I use it as a playground to develop my skills and overcomplicate my life. If something in my life can be automated I will usually try.
My core switch at the house is a Cisco Catalyst 9300 UXM. I’ve got a fiber run to my attic where there’s another Cisco switch which serves my weather station and the outdoor Wifi access point I use on my rooftop deck. I have multigigabit ethernet runs to my main computers and the switch which sits in my home theater AV rack. I run a business class Ruckus ZoneDirector Wifi network with multiple wired access points throughout my house. I have an overcomplicated Home Assistant automation server that ties pretty much everything electrical in my house together for automation and central control. I run a local VMware hypervisor and Kubernetes cluster.
One of the reasons I’m so fond of Roon is that it fits very well into this kind of network. The ability to run the core separate from the streaming endpoints and controller clients is very well aligned with my desires for my home network.
It’s lunacy, really, but I enjoy the hell out of it all and it has been a real benefit to my career just having exposure to all the technologies. It also affords me the conceit of chuckling silently to myself every time someone on the forums recommends I buy a used Cisco 2960 off eBay in order to “improve” my audio quality.
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I guess your Roon Core is virtualized?
My infrastructure is similar. But I use products from Fortinet. And I use KVM (Proxmox) as hypervisor. I do a lot of business with them.
I always have to smile, if people write about the influence of the Roon Core Server. I do not even have a click, if I do live migration of the server while I’m listening to music. And I do not care at all on which physical server it actually runs.
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I love that analogy. People think it’s crazy to pay double (or more) for a car that can do 150 mph when the speed limit is 55 mph. But the 150 mph car is much more fun to drive. I think this holds for audio too. There’s some satisfaction in having the best, even if most people can’t tell the difference. Having said that, is there value to putting high performance ignition cables on your 500 hp car with the promise of 15 hp more? For some yes, for some no. Very similar hobbies.
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Sammy said it best, “I can’t drive 55”.
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Yeah, I run Roon Core in an Ubuntu VM on ESXi 6.7. I played around with ROCK and got it running in a VM, but ultimately realized I prefer the flexibility of a full Linux host for the Core because I wanted to be able to run Zabbix agent and the openvm tools.
I love Proxmox and I’ll probably migrate to it whenever it comes time to upgrade my hardware. The VMware users group (VMUG) has a deal where you can pay $300 a year for their VMUG Advantage membership and get access to the full VMware product lineup free for non-commercial use, so I started out with the full monty vSphere stack. But lately I’ve been doing way more containers/Kubernetes than virtual machines, so I dropped that membership and now I just run the bare, free ESXi kit. As I’m sure you know, they make that a total hassle and there’s so much I can’t do or can’t easily do that Proxmox would make painless. I just haven’t had the time or motivation to migrate, since it would be a disruptive change without adding new hardware.
Someday…
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A wonderful sentiment. Huzzah!
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Wow David! WHAT a system 
Cheers for taking the time to explain. It sounds like a real hobby/passion for you 
Although not the Melco switch a review of the SoTM switch here https://audiobacon.net/2019/04/05/sotm-snh-10g-audiophile-ethernet-switch-review/amp/
even the type of Internet Service Provider (ISP) you have (coax vs fiber) – all contribute heavily to what you hear
Just… wow.
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195 posts for a 2000$ switch?
the “audiophile” world is cracy…
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The number of posts? The price of the switch? Or audiophiles in general?
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amazing is it not, pictures, movies, data files all traverse the internet with out a problem. The moment an audiophile/phool gets involved all bets are off
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not generaly, but i wonder about, what some “audiophiles” spent in money for the hope of a little better sound. IMO the money would better spent in other parts or the room.
But to each his own and i think this was said here a few times (i haven`t read it all)
Correct. Don’t bother…
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At least the last half of the last sentence is accurate:
“The S100 restores the magic of the source stream as no IT device can possibly do.”
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I personally try before I buy, so if I don’t like the performance no money change hands.
All good stores should be doing this now. And with that, there are now excuses not try something out
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