I just purchased my first subscription to ROON and want to know if my set up makes sense to some of those who have been here a while. I have it installled on my Dell 15 7000 with i7, 16G RAM and 512G SSD. My 2TB library is on an NAS attached to my home network. I also use Dirac on the laptop. USB out of laptop goes to Schitt Bifrost and the output of the Schitt feeds my intergrated amp. I also use ROON as volume control. Is this a correct setup or can I do it better? I am a newbie at Roon. Most of my library is lossless and some is HiRes and Super HiRes.
Hi Gary,
Are you wireless with the laptop or do you have an Ethernet connection to it ? Ethernet is best because the Audio always goes through the Core and sometimes real time duplex is too much for wireless.
I’m not sure how Dirac might interact with Roon. Let’s ask Rene (@RBM) who I believe uses a Dirac box.
Eventually there are two architectural improvements you might consider.
The first would be to break the USB connection between laptop and DAC. That can be done by inserting a small computing device that sits on the network, runs Roon Bridge to communicate with Roon and sends USB to the DAC. Depending on the resolution you want you can use an inexpensive DIY device like a Raspberry Pi, Allo Sparky or CuBox. There are also commercial providers such as Sonore with their SonicOrbiter or microRendu. Using this kind of Server/Renderer architecture is reccomended for Roon as the Roon Bridge device and network isolates the signal from the relatively noisy computer environment.
A second architectural possibility would be to run Roon or Roon Server on a dedicated server that would replace your laptop, freeing up the laptop as a Control only. I use a purpose built i7 because I upsample to DSD512, others use NUC style devices with i5s. A dedicated variant of Linux designed to run Roon as an appliance on such NUC devices called ROCK is in the wings.