New to Roon. I have been trialing Roon off my MacBook Pro into my Onkyo P304/M504 combo. I recently heard a Sony HAP Z1 ES that “remasters” everything to DSD, and now I’m hooked, except I want to stay in the Roon realm.
I realize I can get a nucleus, but looks like if I want PCM to DSD conversion, I have to pony up $2500(!!!) before I even have a DAC, storage or my subscription.That’s insane. I’m thinking a Mac mini? What should I be looking at for horsepower?
Upsampling to DSD is extremely CPU intensive. Especially to higher rates like DSD512, which will bring most systems to their knees. Roon uses a single thread per playback zone, though there is an option to enable symmetric multiprocessing for DSD upsampling. Even with that option enabled, upsampling to DSD512 will still crush most CPUs.
So, whatever you use for your Roon Core, the most important factor is the single-threaded CPU capacity. This generally means you want an i7 or i9 with fewerr, higher clocked core than a CPU with lots of cores but a lower max clock per core speed. No matter what Core you go with, this will not be inexpensive.
Thanks guys. I have to do some research on this i7 NUC business. I don’t know that world, at all.
Maybe another option is just to convert my rips to DSD, and send them out native?
Well, Apples M1 chip is looking pretty inviting in the new Mac Minis announced today. Maybe I’ll be the guinea pig and see how Roon core does on the new M1 chip. Plus I can run Plex in tandem, so I can keep using Plex Amp in the car.
how did it go for you finally? I’m running roon on an old i7 (3th gen) and thinking of uprading to some type of silent nuc but tempted to just maybe install on the computer somehing like OMV and have a virtual image running ROON and other images. Not very fond of having a windows machine as a server without a monitor 