I had an idea when reading a query yesterday about suitable ROCK hardware. I decided to see if I could build something easily and cheaply using a gen 11 Celeron processor. This popped up when perusing Amazon (UK) and came pre equipped with 8gb RAM (soldered in) and a 256gb M.2. With discounts and a voucher this came to £149.99 in total. Look at £200 plus normally. After unpacking I simply booted into bios, loaded ROCK and after a short delay it presented me with an IP. I added ffmpeg and signed in to Tidal. The final picture is the most telling. This thing up- samples to DSD256 on a single core and 512 in parallelise mode. Easily. It has a fan. The fan is quiet but obviously not silent. It is responsive and snappy in use and as a networked core I see it handling small libraries and some upsampling to a single endpoint with ease.
I have upsampled for a while now and it seems to be coping well.
Nice share Henry and a cracking price for such a capable little device.
Hopefully will give some people the thought of trying one of these super cheap mini PCs for running Roon Rock
OK, next stress test was adding a library using a USB drive. It is a 2TB Toshiba. Mine has a few MP3, but is mostly CD or DSD with a few HD purchases thrown in. It took 3.5 hours to analyse 14,500 tracks with three cores running. It warmed up and the fan could be heard (a whisper) but it ripped them in that time with no issues. I played tunes while it ripped and they played without a glitch.
My conclusion is this works extremely well for core duties. I guess the real test would be longevity but it works well in every other respect.
Thanks for experimenting with this Henry! I was on the fence about signing up for Roon. I grabbed the same unit on Amazon for my ROCK install. So far so good. I don’t have much of a local library. Maybe 800 FLAC files. So far I’ve only used it to stream Qobuz and Tidal on several endpoints. So far so good.
This post is not exactly about “where Roon Core is installed”, but rather how remote connection via ARC can be simply routed.
Basically I have two nucs - one is powered on 24x7 where besides Roon Core lot of other stuff is running and the other nuc is used from time to time as dedicated Roon Core. Only one instance of Core is active at time and i need to rsync roon data to new “active nuc” when migrating. But this is not the interesting part , as thanks to LAN discovery Roon can find core on new IP without any issue.
However for ARC from remote location this means static NAT won’t work as each Core has it’s own IP , so I have tried (successfully 
) to use nginx to route incoming ARC traffic to whichever Core is alive. Again nothing genius, just glad it works and maybe could help someone.
###############################################
# Roon ARC TCP Proxy
stream {
server {
listen 55000;
proxy_pass roon-arc_backend;
}
upstream roon-arc_backend {
server 192.168.1.X:55000;
server 192.168.1.Y:55000;
}
log_format basic_stream '$remote_addr [$time_local] '
'$protocol $status $bytes_sent $bytes_received '
'$session_time';
access_log /var/log/nginx/stream-access.log basic_stream ;
error_log /var/log/nginx/stream-error.log warn;
}
FYI, I have now installed Roon Rock on a computer based on a Ryzen 7600, 16GB 6Ghz RAM and MSI Pro B650m-A Wifi. After a lot of messing around I had to back date the BIOS to 7D77V13 (July 2022, latest version is June 2023) in order for Roon Rock to load. I’ll explore further. Anyway, compared to my Intel installs (and even Ryzen 5 5600g) the Ryzen 5 7600 is yet another improvement. So much for those who claim the Rock hardware should have no bearing on the SQ!
I installed my ROCK on a Supermicro X10SLM-F, with an Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 v3. bought it second-hand for about €120. Installing ROCK was very smooth, no issues whatsoever. I have it in a server rack, streaming to a NAD CS1, which in turn is connected over COAX to my Cambridge Audio CXA60. Pretty happy with all of it so far.