Planned Roon set-up, any thoughts?

Tinkering
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Hi all,

I am a Tidal subscriber and I am currently on my two week trial of Roon. I am liking the experience so far and I am planning how I might set-up across my house in the future and I thought I might post my plans here for comments. I also think the act of writing it down may help my thinking!

I am currently running Roon on my desktop windows 10 PC (installed on 512gb Samsung SSD) which has an Intel i5 3570k (overclocked to 4.5ghz) CPU with 8gb ram and GTX 970 graphics card, I have 735 FLAC albums, some in higher definition, running off a spinning hard drive. My PC is connected to my Arcam-irDAC-II via USB and then onto a pair of Adam F5 studio speakers. I also have a Sonos Play 1 in the kitchen and I have an IQBerry Dac Hat on order for my Rasberry Pi3. I intend to connect the Raspberry Pi to my Denon ARVX3300 amplifier which is connected to my Monitor Audio Bronze 5.1 speaker set-up in the lounge.

In terms of control, I have a Samsung S7 phone, my wife an S5 and we also have an older Android Tablet and they all seem capable of controlling things.

My PC is a gaming PC but 3 years old now and I was planning to sell off the parts, as I usually do, to help fund a new machine however I am now thinking, with a bit of tweaking, it might become my Roon Core machine running all the time. I would put it back to stock speed, put a silent fan on it and remove the graphics card. I would leave the Kaspersky firewall and virus software on there but take everything else off.I would then buy a new PC and connect the DAC to that and stream from the old PC.

Some initial questions; should I try and put my own music on a SSD rather than storing it on a SATA drive? Is this a good solution? Are there any other things I should think about?

I am happy with the Sonos solution, and I will report back my experiences with the DAC Hat etc.

Any comments gratefully received.

Thanks
Rossco

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Music if fine stored on a NAS…just make sure you have an SSD / M.2 drive for the OS and Roon

The existing machine should cope OK but if you are upsampling and doing convolution then you will need to see how it goes based on the processor performance

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Thanks for the reply.

I am thinking I will leave the music on the old PC on a 3tb spinning HD (currently about 460gb in size). Roon will be/is installed on the SSD also running Windows 10 etc as described above. There will be no NAS in theory.

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What I was implying is that the ssd is a waste for music, and that even a NAS is fine for the music, as is even tidal streaming for that matter. Usb spinning disk is just fine too

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Roon is an amazing solution.
My RPi 3 works perfectly with Roon…
I Haven’t tested lastest release with Sonos, but when it worked it was nice. Sonos was disconnecting but they said this has been fixed.

I use my library and tidal completely interchangably with no problems.

Most importantly Roon has been perfectly stable and crash free. So 10 points to them… a point is a six pack.

Jeff

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Another note…
Wired Ethernet, good switches, routers… that was the key to good streaming…

1 Like
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Good tips, thanks. My switches are good and I actually use Devolo 1200 homeplugs rather successfully. What I may have a problem with to connect the pi is power outlets but I digress…

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The IQaudiO Pi-DAC Pro turned up today. After a little fiddling, its all up and running and sounds great!