If I’m interested in setting up a brand new Roon environment for optimal performance, I’d like to know what hardware and setup criterion I should be thinking about. My home is not wired for ethernet except at the router but I might have CAT5 behind the phone jack in several rooms. (Need to investigate) I will seek to have speakers in multiple rooms but those rooms will likely be some form of wireless speaker setup. My music is primarily housed on external drives but streaming via Tidal is also of interest. Hardware and setup suggestions are most welcome as I’m starting from scratch. I’m not afraid of setting up a dedicated i7 Roon Core as that would seem to deliver the best performance? Thanks!
What a nice blank canvas. Everyone’s gonna have an opinion on this! Firstly, what hi fi equipment (dac/speakers/dac) do you have in your main listening area? And secondly, what’s your budget?!
start with Rock (nuc i3 as advised) and look for an endpoint that suits you. You can start with airpods and ipad eyc etc…
@olchon Thanks for asking!
Speakers are Gershman Avant Garde, Amp is SimAudio Moon 340i. DAC is a BelCanto DAC 3 but will look to upgrade that to something more current. Budget = $5-$7K.
@adamus AirPods? You mean Airport?
also, worth mentioning I have 2tb worth of music I’d want to have Roon access, so not a small amount. on the page for Roon ROC, they talk about small to medium vs. large libraries. where does mine fall? lastly, my wife may force me to add a CD player in the rig, so appreciate suggestions in this context. Thanks!
Regarding the CD player, I would get a drive for the PC and rip anything she/you purchase for playback through Roon. This will allow you to take advantage of convolution, peq, and up-sampling if you’re so inclined.
Understood. Well, then for yourself, being able to rip your music and play via Roon is well worth the effort in my experience.
Regarding ROCK, I’ve run it on a couple different standard PCs, currently circa 2013 Dell mini-pc that only consumes 25w at idle, slightly higher processing convolution and upsample but still very low. As long as the PC can be placed out of the room, no need to spend $ for fan-less. Slow moving fans still cool quite effectively.
By far the most significant gains I’ve found has been in software, specifically custom made convolution filters for my speakers, room, seated position. See Home Audio Fidelity thread(s). I have no connection other than a very satisfied, and wildly impressed, customer.