So out of interest I was offered one of these today and I will be collecting it tomorrow if I can remember 
I was going to update it to the latest MacOS, but actually DietPi could be an interesting option for it and I will have a think about that too
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Interesting. But Iāve already tried it as above. I donāt recommend it (and Iām all in Apple ecosystem). You could update the OS all the way up to Sonoma by some trick (Iām sure you already know how), but I donāt think it will make much difference. Iām all ears about your experience with DietPI. This is my next project soon.
Yes I have watched some YT videos on doing the update to an older Macbook Pro that I use for ripping vinyl and microphone calibration but I have been nervous to pull the trigger. I would not worry about this one as I have a Mac Mini M1 as well, so not a lot of damage to do I think
Why didnāt you diagnose Rock to see why it was slow? Thatās right, you canāt! All you can do is buy a new server and hope things will run better.
I think your tests are faulty, trade rags and my own testing have shown no sq differences between a nucleus and other servers/OSās.
Now you are probably using usb which is garbage going to a dac, but if you would use Ethernet to your dac, you would hear no differences between any server/OS. Also, I run a server that sits between my dac and my room server, and this server accepts Ethernet output from the Roon server and sends the data to the dac using i2s. It doesnāt matter what server or OS Iām running in another room from my music room.
You will hear more difference in cables than what you will hear in different server hardware/OS.
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Not clear to me how using a hard drive Mac versus a nucleus feeding into a good quality streamer could do make any difference to streaming sound quality??
Fixed that for you.
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Interesting @Michael_Harris
I have been running ROCK directly on my aging MacBook Air (2013) since July last year.
I used reFind to get the system to boot and give me the option to install ROCK from USB.
I then run two DietPi with extension manager and have around 7 end points of various flavours. I donāt use much DSP so nothing is particularly load intensive. Search for The The on my system about 3 seconds but I only have a thousand albums stored (though no The The)
The ROCK server and the NAS on which I store my music are connected to my network and router by Ethernet although some of my endpoints are wifi.
It would be an interesting comparison if you had a chance to install ROCK on your Mac Pro which would be a direct comparison.
I have done no detailed testing of SQ or search but for me ROCK/Mac intel has been a winning combination.
I have previously tried running Roon Server on an iMac (i5 with 32gb of RAM), ROCK as a VM, Intel/Windows and I think some other combos but nothing has give me the long term stability of my current setup.
Not relating the following to your experience but for others reading this I should also say that I have had serious issues with Roon in the past (3+ years back) all of which turned out to be network related but exhibited in slow search, drop outs, skipping and other fundamentally annoying things. Turned out I had a faulty switch in my network, a faulty Ethernet cable in the chain and took a while to diagnose especially as my network was not showing any issues with any other devices. Havenāt had any problems since moving to Mac/ROCK but, in fairness, for me Roon has been much more solid in performance for quite a while now.
Anyway hope my experience is helpful for some people
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Roon RAAT is a lot more sensitive to packet loss/retransmit than ānormalā TCP/IP streams, because Roon monitors endpoint streams to detect and give up on excessive delays that would affect high-quality reproduction. In contrast, most other apps take advantage of TCP/IPās designed robustness to network glitches and just proceed, even if there would be perceptible delays in their operation. Besides flaky hardware, one common source of similar issues is bursty packet loss when streaming over WiFi, which is hard to prevent in highly congested WiFi neighborhoods.
Thatās a good clear explanation thank you
Hi Marcus I installed DietPi on the Mac Pro yesterday and when I get some time later this week I intend to try Roon and copy all my data across and restore a backup and test away.
I donāt see the point of ROCK for me as it doesnāt offer enough features or any kind of monitoring features, but for many who want the plug and play experience itās a good choice.
When I had around 2,500 albums (and no Cloud music library) Roon was perfect for me (in the timeframe of 1.8) and super fast at everything.
The issues with searches like The The seems to be that it stresses out all cores and does web searches so that raw processing power wins out. I happen to have a lot of The The in my library and Qobuz and Tidal. It will be interesting if Xeon chips make a difference, even being 10 years old.
Others like @CrystalGipsy and @Menzies have tried removing their steaming libraries with improved results in their Roon setups. Personally I donāt want that as I have grown to love Tidal and Qobuz integration.
My NUC Roon server is connected directly to an unmanaged network switch that is connected to my Orbi router and also runs Plex server with excellent performance results.