A thought on the future of ROCK. Now that Intel isn’t the sole NUCbox creator, there are some very very good inexpensive solutions out there that perform great. I’d love if some of these MOCKs could become ROCK approved.
@David_Snyder recently discovered the GMKtec box, which is currently below $150 on Amazon (sale ends in a few days). I wrote up a whole post on (see below) why I think it’s actually better than any of the NUC / ROCKs I’ve previously built, and even though it’s technically a MOCK, it is far simpler to get running because of both no-muss, no-fuss hardware and no BIOS settings to touch than any NUC I’ve seen before. I hope that Roon begins to consider testing & approving some of these less expensive non-core NUCbox options, because they are great. I’d honestly suggest this to anyone who wants to get on ROCK these days unless they are going to do serious multi-zone simultaneous DSP on very hi-res streams.
What do you all think? Should we broaden the aperture of what makes for an approved ROCK? Or given the fact that Roon has a much less expensive version of the Nucleus that they’re selling now, is this too much competition and will it remain a MOCK, despite all the appealing features?