I am in my third year as a roon subscriber. I have been following the online community since the beginning with great interest and some amusement, this is my first post, it will be a bit long, but try to bear with it.
I have a number of ‘zones’ where I want my music, Lounge (Nucleus), Kitchen (Naim Mu-so 2nd) and Attic (in2audio-Merrick 1R).
I work in my Attic have which doubles as a guest room/media room. Before roon I had Denon HEOS so had/have 2 Denon AVRs and a HEOS speaker in the Kitchen. I consider I am a bit on the spectrum being of an obsessive nature and I wanted to migrate to a complete roon environment.
The Attic was the last part of the project, I know I can stream to the Denon there via AirPlay, but I love multichannel and wanted High Res playback, (even if this one is a bit of the Emperor’s new clothes). I have an OPPO in both the Attic and Lounge that I can stream multichannel to, including DSD but I wanted the roon convenience, I am not sure I could tell you the difference between FLAC and DSD either, but I like to think I can.
I started to look around for a reasonably priced solution, roon ready equipment can be expensive, particularly for muiti-channel playback, which was the reason why I got a Nucleus, after first investing in a Cambridge N85, which didn’t fully meet my needs, all be it sounded great. I was not going to pay that kind of money for the Attic.
I decided to check out the prebuilt ROCK solution. The one I decided to go with for the Merrick 1R from the start-up company in2audio. I found the Merrick on eBay along with other ROCK solutions.
I also started to look around for reviews and information to see if it was sound. There wasn’t much out there, so naturally I thought I would check out the roon community to see if it had an opinion, got one of the machines, tested it etc. No one appeared to have, I may have missed it. But there were a number of opinions and suspicions about the company and evil intent to usurp the roon name.
Firstly, the company does not claim to be Ready or Tested, it states that it can be configured for roon as well as other configurations. It is a ROCK, which roon makes available to the public, or as I like to call it ‘roon for the People’.
Not everyone can build these or wants to, even less can afford £1000-£20,000 for equipment. But everybody who wants to use and subscribe to roon should be able to do so with access to all its functions, not through Airplay, you might as well use Spotify and a Sonos.
My requirements for my Attic solution where:
- · Multichannel playback
- · HR Music playback
- · Complete roon integration
I was looking for a complete roon solution that doesn’t break the bank. My Attic is networked I had the house networked but did part of it myself to reduce costs, is there a theme here?
I contacted the company and had an exchange of emails with them about my requirements. I was assured it would meet my needs. In the UK you have consumer rights to return goods within two weeks if you don’t want the goods for any reason. What did I have to lose!
I ordered the Merrick 1R via eBay it arrived promptly the next day. I plugged it in, connected it to the AVR via HDMI and Network, opened roon, configured it to play multichannel and it did exactly what it said it would do on the box.
It sounds great, works seamlessly with roon, cost £369 and looks cool too. I am more than pleased, I have also tested it down in my lounge, it sounded even better through my Q Acoustic speakers. tested all types of music, rock, soul, folk, classical, stereo, 5.1, 7.1 I am very happy with the Merrick, which is in2audio’s base unit, it can come with an SSD or without, I store my music on a NAS that is why I went with the base unit.
Anyone looking for an excellent and reasonably priced roon solution should consider checking them out.
Maybe roon should look at endorsing prebuilt ROCKS and working with such companies, everyone has to start somewhere, roon for the People, ROCKS.
Thanks to those who read this to the end I hope it has provided food for thought!
