Running the ROCK on a Intel NUC7i3BNH to IFI Nano-DAC via USB connection…can do native DSD256/upscaling from TIDAL without any problems
My question is about to use HQPlayer with the NUC…Possible?..via Network mayby?
Have a medium laptop with i5 to run the HQPlayer
Asking because a better sound quality?..if not…nwm
Try it and see what you think. HQP has a trial mode. Remember to turn on Network Control on the HQP menubar if you’re running it on a different machine than the Roon Core.
I ran HQ Player on my NUC i7 with 16GB and 1TB SSD for a while with no problems. It had Windows 10 on it. Fan kicked in quite a bit when I pushed it to higher upscaling. Now it has ROCK on it and I am using the built in Roon DSP which sounds just fine to me.
As to sound differences, many members here believe that adding an endpoint such as one of the Sonore Rendu devices makes more difference. All that is subjective, of course. My setup now is the NUC i7 running ROCK using an ultraRendu powered by an SBooster and I am very pleased with the sound and performance. Music is stored on an 4 drive QNAP NAS.
I imagine you’ve answered this before, but comparisons of ROCK vs. Linux NUC with Roon Server? ROCK has skinny Linux (benefit: low CPU). Got that much. Anything else?
Thanks for the references. Let me ask it another way. Having a Rock, what should I do in the next little while if I should want to use Roon extensions:
Be patient wink wink
Start reading up on Linux and and prepare to convert to an Ubuntu/Server setup.
If I were a member of media, I’d rush over to my computer, and type: “News Flash: Roon Announces Support for ROCK Extensions”. A senior official at Roon Labs said, its good as done, or something like that."
In the mean time, you could get yourself a Raspberry Pi, slap DietPi on it, install node.js, run @Jan_Koudijs’s excellent Extension Manager install script and run your extensions happily while being patient.