Roon optimization guide for increased sound quality

Just a sharing from my experience. I dedicated a fanless NUC with 2 SSD inside, and a fanless pc also got 2 SSD inside for Roon system, also a new but abandoned Raspberry Pi 4B.

I ran ROCK in my NUC, and now I run Roon server in a highly trimmed Ubuntu Server 22.04 with its official Realtime kernel in a fanless PC, and then Roon Bridge in another highly trimmed Ubuntu Server 22.04 with its official Realtime kernel in NUC. Because I found that Roon server will increase system latency terribly.

But if running Roon Bridge or not it doesn’t matter the system latency, they are more or less the same.


You can tell Roon server causes 100 times worse in latency.

In my understanding, Roon Bridge will store a buffer of processed music data from Roon Server (I heard that’s 10 seconds, well, leave it), before sending these music data from memory to the output, e.g. USB. So using a Roon Bridge would induce the lowest latency for music playback. In another words, better sound.

Of course there are some other ways can be shared to make the best of Roon to sing from my experience, yet I don’t want to waste time and energy in Roon forum war.

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