I know what you mean.
What are you saying? i5 or i7?
I have never read anyone say that they would guarantee an I3 to upsample at any rate or provide dsp services. I have read many people say that an I3 would more than suffice without this expectation without a problem. I have also read that the I5 would not upsample to 512 reliably and could provide minor dsp services (full room correction with upsampling might present a problem). I’ve used it with my Hugo2 to 768 with a minor network stutter every once in a while with no room correction. I’ve read no one has hesitation with an I7. An I7 may not handle all DSP demands would be the comment I have read about it. It would do all the other scenarios without problem. If this helps.
It depends on what money means to you.
An i3 will probably work, but why take a chance?
Although I’ve successfully used an i3 for Roon, if I was buying today I’d get an i5.
Actually, if I was buying today, I’d wait another couple of months and get a Ryzen 3000 series, in an i5 strength. Much more bang for the buck, but that’s another thread.
8GB for ROCK, or dual-channel 16GB for Windows (that you use for other tasks).
That is incorrect. There are other tasks, e.g. UI in addition to one-zone playback.
It sounds like the i3 is sufficient especially if you are only going to upsample to PCM.
The learning curve/geek factor of using REW is just to high for me to bother using DSP for Room correction.
So I would take the comments about the importance of DPS with a grain of salt.
I built my own roon server using an old NUC, a D54250WYK, and guess what… it works flawlessly.
I have 3000 albums, upsampling without a problem up to 384.
a modern i3 is more than sufficient IMO
Thanks Matt. Just the sort of answer I’d hoped for. I’d talked myself into the i5 but from what you’ve said I just don’t need it.
Do you use Windows or ROCK?
Which i3 do you have? I’m guessing it’s a few years old from the model number you supplied so the current model should be even more capable?
I use ROCK… and what a difference compared to my Macbook running Audirvana!! I wasn’t expecting that at all!! It’s a real leap forward.
My NUC is an i5… from 2013! any current i3 will blow it out of the water.
Yes it took nearly 2 days to index my 3000 albums but who cares. It’s done.
Navigation is fluid. DSP works without stuttering… what else to ask.
I’m glad you’re so happy with yours.
It’s interesting you’re finding the performance better than Audirvana with a MacBook. That’s how I listened for years and rated it highly. Do you have the ROCK connected directly to the DAC?
I’ve considered ROCK too which I could do as it will be a dedicated Roon machine. The only thing that puts me off is backups. I subscribe to Office 365 so I have OneDrive storage available. If I install Windows, I can backup my whole music collection to the cloud without extra expense. If I install ROCK, I guess I could do the same thing with Dropbox but I’d have an additional subscription. This is my only reason for going for a Windows machine.
If anyone can suggest any backup solutions for my collection that would allow me to use ROCK, please let me know. I don’t want any further subscriptions or a NAS drive. Unless I’m mistaken, this rules out ROCK?
yes, ROCK direct to DAC… well, almost, I do have a USB reclocker in the path.
Personally I do manually backup my SSD drive from time to time… that’s good enough. No mirroring, no scheduled backup.
One of the biggest upgrades I’ve experienced was disconnecting my computer from the DAC. I replaced it with a SOtM SMS-200. I’m not sure what your reclocker does or whether it serves the same function. If not I couldn’t recommend something like the SOtM highly enough.
I’d be very grateful if I could pick your brains about your NUC and how you back it up. I wouldn’t mind performing manual backups to an SSD as long as the backup duplicated my whole music library and not just the Roon data files. How would I do this?
Also I would need to configure the NUC with an M.2 and SATA SSDs rather than just one large M.2 SSD as I’d intended. That’s correct isn’t it?
I’m also not clear how I would rip CDs and add them to Roon if I was to use Rock. Currently I do this with iTunes in the middle.
Can you point me in the right direction?
An i5 " Wilson Canyon" machine running with the Haswell processors
What configuration in terms of RAM and SSD are you running on it?
I have built an ‘Ice Canyon’ DC3217IYE with an i3 Ivy Bridge processor (which is older than yours) and a i3 Maple Canyon using the Broadwell-U processors NUC5i3MYHE & NUC5i3RYH - all run ROCK, and the Roon Core works flawlessly.
My library is over 6k albums and 80k tracks - 4 endpoints, 2 used regularly. DSP for upconverting streaming and Internet radio sources and down converting formats to 24/192 and DSD64.
So no need for the latest and greatest NUC hardware, particularly with an embedded Linux based OS, such as RoonOS as supplied with ROCK.
Simon.
Are you saying Rock is easier on the processor than windows or an i3 is equally suitable for both?
ROCK will be easier on the processor since it has minimal other background processes and services. That being said I run Roon Server in Windows 10 on a NUC8i3 and it barely gets above idle even to multiple end points. See below for snapshot of the server load playing a TIDAL track with volume leveling and bit depth conversion;
Yes. On a Nuc/ROCK, just the Roon files and ROCK OS are on the M.2. The 2.5" 1TB SSD SATA drive I got was $100.
From what I understand, for you to run ROCK you need a Nuc dedicated to the Roon stuff, and another PC running Windows to back up your Music files (to a USB drive or the Cloud) and rip CDs. If you don’t have the Nuc now, you already have the Windows computer.
The ROCK setup is nice because you just get it going and it does its thing. But frankly, a NUC running Windows 10 and Roon is still a great setup and has some upsides too. I don’t think it will suffer very much, sound-wise, unless you have a lot of other things running on it at the same time.
My suspicion is that there would be no sound quality penalty if the NUC is not connected to the DAC physically. With the NUC in a different room and connected to a pair of KEF LS50 Wireless speakers via wifi, I don’t think the extra electrical noise caused by running multiple tasks would be passed on. That said, it would be dedicated machine so would only run Windows, Anti-Virus and Roon anyway.
I’m not sure I understand that. How can Roon perform bit rate conversion? It can’t create bits that don’t exist?
Have you performed sample rate conversation with the i3?
When you upsample digital audio data you ‘create bits’, that is done by interpolation, which is just maths. Much like when you scale up an image you ‘create’ extra pixels.
In the case shown in my screen grab above it is just the bit depth that is being increased from 16 to 64 to reduce the impact of rounding errors etc when doing the volume levelling. When that is complete the bit depth is reduced back down to 24 again since that is max bit depth that my Chromecast Audio (in this case) can accept.
This is all digression anyway my point was that a recent i3 processor is more than powerful enough to run multiple end points, perform a reasonable amount of DSP (including bit depth/sample rate conversion, room correction and volume levelling) and support a medium size library. Irrespective of whether you intend to use ROCK or Windows.
Linux is much more performant on any hardware. Windows has such an overhead.
Then with an embedded headless leanOS, based on a Linux distribution, you strip away all necessary functionality such as a graphical desktop, lots of device drivers and you get a lot more from the hardware.