ROCK from inside-tech

I’m going to say a lot about the commercial motivations of a company like Roon Labs. We don’t do this often, but you have to remember that it is very expensive to develop Roon and associated products. We are a business that has the goal of being/staying profitable. We also are growing and would love to continue to grow our team to reach more of our product goals.

See here. We do not allow ANYONE to redistribute our software without permission. Sections 1.2 and 2.1 both prohibit redistribution.

There are brands out there that license Roon OS for distribution. Inside Tech and others that distribute ROCK are stealing our work.

We didn’t have to give ROCK out for free. We chose to do so because we carefully segmented the DIY people from the turn-key people. Vendors like Inside Tech are violating our T&C, and by blurring the line between DIY and turn-key, they are hurting our turn-key business.

Roon OS was very expensive for us to develop. We had 2 goals to our bottom line with Roon OS: to reduce expenses by reducing support burden and to gain income by licensing Roon OS.

We also were very careful in how we positioned ROCK. It was not meant to be turn-key so it does not compete with our other offering of Roon OS: Nucleus. Nucleus is an important income source for our company. Vendors like Inside Tech mess with our strategy through violation of our T&C. You may say we’ll make money from subscriptions anyway, but who do you think is buying these boxes? New Roon members or existing Roon members? We aren’t making a cent when Inside Tech redistributes our software because all those customers already have Roon licenses.

I don’t think anyone is offended. But, these vendors are also lying. I can tell you for sure that putting ROCK in a fan-less case will put undesirable heat stress on your CPU. Nucleus has additional software to help with that issue.

That’s a different issue. The licensing issue is about codec patents. That said, it’s unclear if Inside Tech is paying AAC patent fees when they include ffmpeg on their machines. For vendors that license Roon OS, we require they pay these fees. We also pay these fees for Nucleus.

If you can’t afford a Chanel bag, you shouldn’t buy a knockoff. It’s not the same as shoplifting the bag from the store, but it is a form of IP theft that does hurt the business. Either buy the Nucleus (or another brand that compensates us) or go the full DIY route as we intended. These companies are abusing our goodwill towards DIY users and profiting off of our work with no compensation to us.

SonicTransporter is not running Roon OS, but it is preinstalled with RoonServer. They had our explicit permission to do this (one of the few from long ago that did get this).

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Specifically for the NUC7i7BNH model used in Nucleus Plus yes?

Or are you generalising for every ROCK supported NUC board put inside a fanless case?

@dabassgoesboomboom – Your post was a good point for me to clarify, so I’ll answer it even though you withdrew it.

I’m talking about every NUC or other computer that is fanless. The specs we recommend generally have a 15w TDP on the low end, and 28W TDP on the high end. The CPU fan stops you from overheating. This is its purpose.

If you have ~15W TDP, you can reasonably passively cool it even at 100% CPU, but go up to ~28W and you start getting into trouble. Sure, it’s possible in a well cooled room, but we’ve seen people put their fanless devices in drawers and expect them to work. That’s not even including turbo boost, which will absolutely kill you (going over 100c in 200ms). Above 28W, forget about going fanless without huge amounts of copper.

Some NUCs are really low TDP, and I know the NUC7i7DN is a popular low TDP fast machine. but even it gets pretty hot, and the turbo boost is still a problem. You can throttle it down in the BIOS, but that’s defeating the point. You want to do it dynamically, but ROCK won’t do that for you because it expects a fan. To do this smart, you also would rather throttle off parts of the OS and parts of Roon that are not needed. For example, importing/analyzing/metadata updates/etc can be expected to be a lower priority when doing DSP on playback. Nucleus is smarter than ROCK in these ways because it knows it has no fan.

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Noted but even using HQPlayer or playing intensive games “will put undesirable heat stress on your CPU” so it was a bit of a hand wavy comment, without further expansion.

Thanks for expanding on what you meant…

Noted and I know about the challenges of passively cooling the NUC7i7BNH, which is used in your Nucleus Plus… the model that this vendor of this thread is selling is the 15W TDP NUC7i7DNHE. If they do a good job with assembly it shouldn’t have any issues with ROCK for many years.

Assuming they get in line and stop breaking Roon rules of course

I’ve monitored CPU temp (not case temp as people often do) very closely of my NUC7i7DNHE running Roon Server and HQPlayer doing DSP at DSD512 and CPU temp doesn’t go above 70 deg C… even after hours in a 30 deg C room (summer)… I even tested with Roon doing background audio analysis at full throttle and doing full library import and it’s the same (obviously not using HQP at DSD512 at same time in latter case).

So if you assemble it properly inside the appropriate Akasa case, I don’t see problems with ROCK , not with the 15W TDP NUC7i7DN specifically…

I agree, don’t keep it in a drawer though.

Feel free to split these posts out if you want. I don’t want to detract from the important topic here of a website breaking rules.

I’m just a few weeks into ROCK after migrating from a Mac Mini and I just could not be happier with the results.

My NUC has some fan noise but I have it in a separate room. The entire concept of an OS dedicated to running the core is far superior in countless ways.

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Check your 7i7DN CPU pstates (or the frequency) – I know that Intel pstate management has lowered it considerably if you are around 70C. Without saying much more, I can tell you that I know that DN board better than the BN and its power management is far more advanced.

I know… hence my first reply to you… you can unhide it if you like.

yah, but it just lowers cpu speed to keep that temp down :angry: very stupid behavior because it cant be smart.

You know how I always get my knickers in a twist about marketing hyperbole, Slim. Dog whistle to my ears. Not intended as such, I know.

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Apart from the breaking the rules issue, which is very serious and should be persecuted (as I am sure Roon is already taking legal action to protect its IP), I am having a little trouble keeping up with the temperatures/cooling discussions.

As I understand it, every computer has its temperature limits managed by the BIOS and the CPU instruction set. They will throttle the CPU speed to keep temps in check all the time, to a point of powering off to protect the CPU (who doesn’t remember AMD Athlon 1000-C death by high temps?)

The you have the OS and the running tasks presenting loads to the CPU, and the temperature will rise in accordance with such loads. Until now, I believe I am stating the obvious.

Now comes the difficult part. If I run windows/linux/mac os on my PC, alongside with roon, this setup will present a certain load to the CPU. ROCK should not present a higher load to the CPU, given it stripped down nature (except if it artificially creates the load).

Or else, it would always be best to run windows/linux/mac os + roon than ROCK. Your PC would be under lesser stress, and you would maximize component life. This conclusion is independent of being the system passively or actively cooled (one should not want to present its system with a higher load than necessary, and having the fans constantly on higher mode etc).

Did I get anything wrong?

its a lot more complicated nowadays, not just frequency, but you mostly understand this correctly.

You didn’t get it wrong, but you missed out on something huge opportunity to do better. An OS has a bunch of things its doing all the time. The trimmer the OS, the less it does. Because this requires less CPU, the CPU is allowed it to idle cooler. When something needs CPU power, the CPU idles less, but runs hotter. Eventually, too hot for comfort, and then it throttles down and slows everything evenly. This is because most operating systems do not prioritize threads for the kernel’s scheduler. It can be done, but it just isn’t done.

In my example above, you are analyzing files for waveforms and volume leveling, and you are playing audio at the same time. Clearly you should deprioritize the less critical analyzing before throttling down to the point where you impact playback – but a normal OS can’t do that – it doesn’t know the difference between Roon and backup software. In fact, my Mac OS laptop is currently doing things completely unrelated to audio playback at the moment, all those things are unimportant, yet they generate heat.

The subtle point here is that if your OS is optimized for the use cases in an explicit way, you can get a lot more bang for the buck. A popular example of this is Android vs iOS – Android flagship phone CPUs are always so far ahead of iPhone CPUs. However, iOS has always felt snappier. iOS cheats all over the place, placing priority on system UI (which can’t be changed), and having crappy multitasking. Android’s flexibility means it can’t optimize as well.

Now, how does this impact component life? Well, running a CPU hotter rather than cooler will lower its lifespan. Run it at 120C for an hour or two and I’m sure it’lll just stop working. Run it at 80c, and it’ll stop after a year or two. Run it at 50c, and it’ll go strong for 10+ years.

If you stop looking at CPU as “speed” AND “heat”, but instead use a single metric of “speed for heat”, the goal should be to get the largest performance (“speed for heat”) doing the critical thing, not some auxiliary thing, at the lowest temperature.

If you run ROCK on a fanless machine, you won’t get that because we optimize ROCK for fans. Also, it’s unclear if anyone else does this on any systems. On the few I’ve taken apart, the power management is lame at worst, and ‘generic desktop class’ at best.

Perhaps adding CPU temp monitor to ROCK would be a useful thing so all us fanless users which is a high majority I imagine? I know others have asked for it. More and more are using fanless as it makes them more useable in living areas and the cases are sometimes aesthetically more pleasing. .

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Thank you very much for the detailed reply. Much appreciated.

Accepting your speed for heat metric, and given that I use a nuc with fan, it terms of your metric, will I be better off using ROCK or running Roon off a standard OS?

ROCK still has the best experience, by far! There is an upcoming change coming that will make ROCK even better. Look for it later this summer.

We have it, but it assumes fans will be there. Adding the option to turn ROCK into Nucleus for DIY fanless cases is not interesting.

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I meant one we can see as a user, not under the hood. So we can see and judge how efficient or not they are.

Roon is not open source.

Roon OS and Roon are both not available for redistribution.

There is indeed a breach. Your statement couldn’t be further from the reality of things. Read my posts above to understand why there is a breach of T&C and what our position on this is.

It’s just the machine, pre built. Not supplied with it installed.

It’s a hardware solution.

The software is to be added along with the licence.

As far as I understand it’s fine?

What does it mean when I get my machine and install roon core, is this not allowed? I’m confused

That’s funny.:laughing:

One of these people is the COO of Roon.

Once a customer buys the machine he can put any Roon software on it that he wants.

It’s when a vendor uses Roon software pre-installed to sell their product, without licensing it from Roon, that there is a violation.

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In my quick skimming their page actually doesn’t mention anything of ROCK being pre-installed (I may have missed it).

But one of the customer reviews says:

Hmm, I read their page a couple of days ago and it did imply that Roon software could be pre-installed.

At least, that’s how I remember it.:smirk: