Roon 3 Zone Setup

Looking for advice on setting up Roon anew after my Pioneer AV Receiver packed in.

I had Roon running on an old i7 laptop and reading my music from a library on a qnap. Roon was playing through a Meridian MC200 onto the Pioneer that was wired to speakers in 3 zones at home.

My idea was to upgrade qnap to run Roon itself as well as hold the music library and feed an amp/amps to play to the 3 zones. One of the zones is my main listening area with 2 passive kef floor standing speakers and the other two zones have either ceiling or outdoor speakers.

Does Qnap for Roon App & Library with 1 main high end Amp and two secondary Amps for each of the other zones make sense? What equipment alternative setups would you suggest?

Any suggestions for the above setup would be highly appreciated.

Unless you need to upgrade your NAS anyway, it might be easier and cheaper to get a NUC and load ROCK on it for your Roon server. If you are replacing the Pioneer, why not look for an integrated amp that is Roon ready for your main room? You can then use something like a Blue Sound PowerNode to drive the other two zones. Another option if you already have amps you want to reuse is to get one of these Whirlwind? It’s a 3 zone one-box Roon streamer. I use one in my home for 3 zones of in-wall and in-ceiling speakers. It’s only a streamer, so I use a 6 channel amp along with it to power 3 zones of speakers. It works great and is plug and play. It also has the capability to run the Roon server, although I haven’t tried that.

This doesn’t seem relevant to your problem. If your old i7 laptop was running Roon just fine then why would you need to move it?

I would focus on finding 3 strong endpoint solutions and getting those integrated in Roon. If you run into performance problems on the i7 when sending to 3 zones (you don’t know if any of your zones will use / need DSP yet) then you’ll have a baseline for what kind of horsepower a new Core would command.

My qnap is about 10 years old, although the hd’s are relatively new. I think I replaced them about 3 years ago. So that would probably need to be upgraded anyhow as it causes me issues with video streaming and sound codecs it cannot handle. Sorry, I forgot to mention this.

So, I guess, the point is really to find the right amps to run the 3 zones off the roon that would be running on the qnap. One main high-end inegrated amp and two smaller ones to run each zone, maybe?