I just wanted to commend and thank Roon for the excellent documentation to do with setting up ROCK on a NUC. Though there are a few (not many) somewhat fiddly aspects to it, the docs were systematic and made everything more or less foolproof. At any rate, I couldn’t fault them and everything went just as they said it would.
It makes a nice change from what too often happens in these situations, namely that you get halfway through the documented steps for some process, only to find that one of them doesn’t quite match reality and you end up stymied, unable to go on and with the computer, say, stuck in some nether region between valid states. (Or you figure it out but only by doing the work of the docs yourself.)
As for switching the Core to ROCK/NUC, I may be tricking myself, but everything seems to sound better than when the Core was running on an old Windows desktop. I can’t say anything about long term reliability because I’ve only been running it a day or so.
If you’d like to know, the NUC I am using is a 7th Gen i3, with, for the moment, just 4GB of RAM. I bought it secondhand rather than get a new 10th Gen one that isn’t officially supported. Cheaper too.
Me too I migrated from Mac Air to ROCK/NUC yesterday . The first impression is an improvement of SQ. Sound is more warm , dynamic range its more open and natural. I hope discover in future further improvements.
Well, I admire the snappy way you turn a phrase.
It’s right up there with “Headless Body In Topless Bar”.
More important, I’m glad your install went smoothly!
I agree! The Rock NUC does sound better than my previous Mac-based core. It’s so cliche to say, but it was a true upgrade! Everything sounds clearer with more dynamic range.
That seems to be my experience too - “clearer” is the best way to describe it. I say “seems”, though, as I still can’t help being sceptical of apparent improvements coming about from doing nothing more than migrating from one means of feeding bits to the output to another. Nothing else has changed. The way of connecting them up is the same (core-wired-router-wireless-mesh router-wired-output). My reason for moving to NUC was just so I could leave the core on all the time. I wasn’t expecting any other difference. So, I don’t know. I’m not complaining, though. It really does seem to have improved the sound quality and I suppose if it seems like it has then it may as well have done so. :>)
