Can Roon comment on whether the new Pi4 (link below) has the capability to host a RoonCore:
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There’s currently no Roon core compiled for ARM, so without a release of Core for ARM it’s less about capability and more about possibility.
I’d say that it’s not quite powerful enough yet to reliably be a core. It might work for a few endpoints with minimal DSP, but as soon as you got decent DSP it would fall over. For that reason it probably wouldn’t be a great idea to release Core for ARM as it would open the floodgates of people complaining of crashes!
(I’d love to see this happen though - for a very specific use case of Roon while travelling without a laptop!)
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I’d risk a guess: Roon is a .NET app. Therefore if you have a .NET runtime compiled for Rpi 4 you’ll probably can roll your own Roon core.
I agree that core running on the Rpi4 has interesting use cases.
Don’t you think it will be powerful enough for only streaming Tidal?
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It already is able to stream tidal with Roon Bridge…a Roon Core it will never be.
I’d imagine uou would have the worst Roon experience using it as a core, sdcard performance wont be fast enough and the processor is way under spec. Same reason you cant run it on a phone. Roon is a very demanding app give it what it deserves.
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I’m a bit confused by that.
I did think that it was possible to host a RoonCore on a fairly basic QNAP NAS.
The Pi4 can be bought with 4GB of RAM and has a quad core processor. Do you really believe that it would be that far behind, and if so, is that based on some kind of experience?
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In the Roon recommended specs that’s a ‘fairly basic’ QNAP NAS with a full 64 bit gen 7 i3/i5 processor (or equivalent from AMD etc), SSD and fast I/O. The Pi4, for all its a big improvement over the previous Pis, doesn’t get near that in either processing or I/O.
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But its not a very fast one, try DSP on it and it would die, much like under spec Nas devices will.
Also, Roon is using DSP for compatibility re-sampling. So even if the user has all DSP disabled, Roon will use DSP in the background if it is deemed necessary. Imagine a user with some DSD files and a non-DSD dac. That would certainly create trouble for an underpowered CPU.
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http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/dhrystone%20results.htm
Looking at benchmarks that compare Intel to ARM shows that the core is indeed not powerful enough.
I’m running Roon Core on a Core 2 Duo Mac Mini late 2009. Linux on SSD. I’m getting very acceptable performance and response. I’m not running any high load DSP and I don’t have any DSD files.
Looking at the benchmark results reveals that the C2D is 2-8 times faster than the A53, depending on the configuration, OS and compiler used.
There are better alternatives for the RPi as a server.
As has already been pointed out above, the fact it isn’t powerful enough is not the biggest issue; there is no Roon Server build for ARM anyway, so it is all moot.
Yet people keep asking. Amazing.
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I know it is almost like they want a sub-standard experience running Roon 
My thanks for the clarification from Roonlabs. Much appreciated.
Not really sure where you’re getting that impression from?
My question was about the viability of what I’m assuming will be a very low powered solution that I can happily leave on 24*7. Feels rather overkill to run Roon on my current PC.
It was just a throw away joke… no offence intended. I understand the question you posed and it is a reasonable one.
EDIT: To answer your question, the best low power option for a Roon server is an Intel NUC or similar.
Here’s an interesting question: is this a device yet that will support HDMI multichannel audio via Roon Bridge? RPI3 couldn’t. JCR
I may be wrong here but I thought the issue with multi-channel was to do with Linux (ALSA?) drivers? As far as I know RPi4 (and 3) can do up to 8ch PCM over HDMI