Thanks again!
I’ll order the Stack Volt then, they’re a good company, I used to have their Link II streamer.
The Volt is not available anymore.
I found the Plixir Elite BDC.
They have 2 models:
19V 4A - will that be enough for the Titan?
Or an 18V 6A - can I use that?
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I moved from a Nucleus+ to a Titan yesterday and I thought I’d share my initial impressions. I have a fairly large library with 4600 albums and 77,266 tracks. While I don’t utilize any upsampling or DSP (outside of volume leveling), I consider my library demanding. It ticks just every box that could cause a problem – a large number of unidentified albums, DSD albums, various artist compilations, large cover art, etc. Over the past year, I have experienced a significant degradation in my day to day Roon performance with the Nucleus+.
In moving to a Titan, I was not sure if I would see much of an improvement since with my library the issues could be software related and not solved by the hardware upgrade. After one day with the Titan, I’m happy to say that my impressions so far are that it has delivered exactly as I had hoped. I am seeing a big difference in the performance across the board and Roon is now responding the way I hoped. My expectations have been exceeded.
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Very pretty box. I personally prefer the server in a closet somewhere else. If I were planning the server to be visible in a high $ audio system, I might consider this eye candy.
I built a NUC13pro into an Akasa fanless case. Not nearly as aesthetic as the Titan, but 1/4 of the cost. (I did customize RAM, m.2 SSD, and used an existing SSD drive for “internal storage”). This was my second NUC Rock build. Prior was a NUC6pro in a fanless case.
ROCK continues to be a solid, appliance like, OS. Any of the few issues I have experienced, ended up being network issues. Roon, in general, abuses a network with a lot of activity. Buy a NUC, and choose an appealing case, or not. Put your interest, and $, into a stable network.
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Thanks for sharing your impressions!
Very interesting to know your library at just 77k tracks is slowing down even a Nucleus+ due to its complexity. May I ask how many DSD and unidentified albums you have in that one?
Have fun with the Titan, it seems to be a great machine!
I wouldn’t know what is required or preferred for the Titan, but i guess i’d start using it with the supplied adapter. This will also give info on required capacity. And i think i read somewhere about Roon Labs producing an upgrade PSU?
I would be more concerned to know why a not so large library was not functioning on the Nucleus + to standard, rather than spending more money to get performance you should have been getting already.
I found the power specs of all Nuclei (Rev. A, B, One and Titan) and they all use the same specced adapter: 19V - 60W which should be 3.16A.
So the Plixir Elite BDC at 19V 4A delivering 76W will do the trick just fine.
What’s more I read that the 4A rating of the Plixir is what it can deliver constant even at high demand, peak output could be near double of that. The Stack Volt’s rating of 5A is the peak rating as I found last night as well.
Here’s a review of major linear PSU’s, I found the read about the Plixir interesting.
So I ordered me one. 
Again, thanks for the tip on the sBooster I was using!
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A rather complex library which is causing roon to demand a lot of computing from the CPU for every standard operation. According to my experience, factors like
- lots of unidentified albums
- lots of albums with plenty of credits
- albums with a plenty of tracks or discs like operas, oratorios or boxsets
- lots of DSD files
are delaying all standard operations such as opening an album, artist or composer page, compiling compositions lists and alike even on a machine which is suitably equipped. My guess would be (pure speculation) that the roon database gets so complicated in the aforementioned cases and the roon core has to search and compare Gigabytes of data every time you press a button in roon that it is slowing down.
My solution back then was reducing the number of unidentified albums (by identifying them manually or removing them), eliminating most of DSD albums and keeping the number of boxsets/Multi-track albums at a reasonable level (have reduced it to just 300 albums with >40 tracks).
Throwing more CPU power at it would have also worked, so the Titan seems to be an adequate choice for such libraries!
It’s sticking plaster not a solution. Roon needs to do better. Throwing cpu at the problem is only masking it. It should not have these issues period.
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According to my experience with a properly equipped NUC (similarly powerful as Nucleus Titan), it is solving the problem, not masking it.
Some constellation of a library might demand more of computing power than others, like having 250k+ tracks. Why should sheer computing power not solve this?
So, when is the Titan coming to Europe?
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Thanks, @Arindal! I have 274 DSD albums and 465 unidentified albums. I’m not sure how determine how many various artist compilations I have, but I would guess around 300.
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My experience differs and being a user a lot longer I can say these issues never used to come up so something in Roon changed and thats the real underlying problem. Throwing new hardware at it isn’t a solution in my opinion unless the machine in question is faulty or really out of the performance category, in this case the N+ should not be. But sure go ahead and throw hardware at it if you want to rather than ask as to why Roon behaves in this way.
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Don’t have to ask roonlabs because the answer in my understanding lies in additional functions and a more complicated way of browsing your library. Since V1.8 things particularly related to classical music and handling of composers/compositions appeared which seemingly demand more of local computing power to enable roon to find matches and compile lists (particularly with a complicated or very large library). I do not see that as a major problem if the core machine can keep up with that.
Just given specs and tracks count, I agree it should handle it with ease. Unfortunately there seem to be additional parameters causing roon to eat up more of local core power than expected. Having lots of unidentified albums was one of these which roonlabs officially admitted, just like having a 250k+ library.
I think discussing them and giving people a chance to optimize their library accordingly is helpful. And if that is not possible, a bigger machine like Titan would help. Nothing wrong with that.
Sounds similar (maybe even more DSD, but less boxsets) compared to what I used to have when my (admittingly much weaker than N+) machine collapsed.
I still find it surprising but absolutely possible that the combination of disadvantageous factors of your library structure might be eating up too much of resources from N+, so Titan offers the necessary amount of additional power you need. According to my experience, there is no hard threshold of track numbers or other parameters which clearly defines if a combination works snappy or not. I encountered similar problems more than a year ago and a more powerful core plus some library cleanup solved the problem. Maybe you might want to manually identify more albums, if possible, that definitely helps not only the speed.
So just lean back and enjoy the Titan!
I chose a different way around it i removed all my really big boxes to a separate drive which is attached analysed and disabled.
A lot of “complete” recording boxes are duplicates in my main library so not an issue if disabled. If I need the album I re enable the drive and it takes a couple of minutes max to be available.
This keeps my main library lean and snappy .
I have only 100 or so unidentified and i use no DSP or DSD so my 10i7 NUC copes happily.
I have a legacy system in JRiver which contains all my boxes so i can easily play anything
Works for me until Roon comes up with a real box set solution
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Why is a specific audio format affecting indexing and searching?
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Why would this affect library performance? The files are bigger, yes, but no bigger than PCM192 files?
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tbh I have no explanation for that. It is just what I experienced several times when replacing DSD by FLAC88 or removing just a few unidentified DSD albums which was speeding up roon noticeably. Maybe it has to do with the .dsf format or the audio analysis data which roon is extracting from it.
Both metadata extraction and audio analysis are one-time operations, right? Once done, it shouldn’t matter anymore.
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