Roon Bridge Deployment for Headphone Rig

I have been enjoying Roon for just over a year now and have recently started to enjoy headphone listening. Rather than frequently disconnecting and reconnecting DAC to either my speaker setup or my headphone amplifier I hope to transfer my headphone listening to my bedroom and use Roon Bridge.

Here is my plan which I hope members can confirm will work and offer helpful advice:

Speaker system: Topping D90 DAC and Pre 90 to twin Schiit Vidar via Roon Rock Nuc in Akasa fanless housing.

Router is connected via ethernet cable to a switch then on to win 10 pc with roon app and the Rock Nuc.

Hope to ethernet cable to the headphone rig in bedroom:
Cambridge Audio 851d to Topping A90 Headphone amp via an ordinary Intel Nuc which would run Roon Bridge on win10 and connect via usb to the DAC.

I have an android tablet with roon app to control the Rock.

Hopefully members can confirm my thinking? All advice welcome.

Thanks in advance

Stuart

Why use windows you going to use the pc for other things? If not look to install Rock on it and use it purely as an endpoint just don’t login to it to enable the server and it will function as Roon Bridge and will be less prone to Windows update issues and is dedicated to audio.

Ah ha! Didn’t know I could do that. I will have a look through our help pages and make sure I know how to boot up the second Nuc with a second rock without logging in.

Thanks a lot that’s really helpful!

An interesting link:

I use ROCK on my fanless high end NUC as a server, and also as an endpoint on my small DELL hockey puck connected to a Pro-Ject DAC. Results are great. My advice is to name them carefully though so you know the different when devices try to connect.

I have had very few issues with ROCK (all at upgrade time - sometimes the full ecosystem gets out of whack, especially the remotes), but these may just be Roon in general and not ROCK specific. It’s not quite set-and-forget, but it’s really close.

Good luck.

LOL after I wrote this I realized I wrote the linked comment too. Glad I agreed with myself…

Thanks Dan!

All U need in Ur bedroom Setup is a raspberry pi 4 that runs roopiee. That will be your roon endpoint. Mine is connected to a WiFi repeater.

My roon core is running in another room on a MacBook air M1. Works all wireless.

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Bring both ROCKs up. From your Roon control app, I guess that would be your PC, select the ROCK that you want as your Core. The other ROCK will show up in Settings==>Audio as an endpoint…

I keep a spare NUC ROCK as a fallback, so when not needed it is used as the endpoint to my main system.

OTOH, my headphone rig is a Topping D90/A90, fed by an RPi running Ropieee.

Thanks Marc!

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All you do is install it, then you will see it in Roon as an available audio zone if a dacs attached and turned on nothing else to do. I have it installed on an old 3rd gen Nuc thin client and it’s works really well and very reliable.

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