Another happy BRIX owner here, with a Core i5 & 16GB of RAM running Windows 10 on a small (80GB) SSD. Totally quiet and very small power footprint as well. Mine runs wired, so no comments about Wi-Fi performance, although it is reported to be spotty by others.
I’ve been toying with the idea of putting a large SSD in the BRIX for local storage of my music files. It will handle both an M2 SSD and a 2.5" form factor simultaneously. My Roon performance has been excellent on this box, with my music on a QNAP TS-251 network attached storage. Currently my database of digital music is about 3,000 albums, although I have another 2,000 or so analog LP’s – classical music – that are mostly not available in digital form.
The only small gotcha on the BRIX is the need to attach an HDMI emulator to run it headless. I got a 4k emulator, which makes the Remote Desktop connection prettier/higher resolution.
I greatly appreciate the ability to keep computers out of my music room. Currently using a Squeezebox Transporter, which of course is a computer, but a specialized one. In another room I have a Squeezebox Touch connected to a headphone amp. The Roon experience with the Touch is a bit better in terms of the front panel interface.
Anyway, I recommend the BRIX Pro Core i5 based on my experience so far.
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Running i3 NUC, with 8GB RAM, Windows 10 64-bit, AC wireless connection (just moved in - will install ethernet), to crappy Synology NAS (211j, connected via ethernet). 40K tracks. No problems at all on main rig. Streaming wirelessly from NUC to Squeezebox Touch in basement home theater has problems playing files of greater resolution than 24-bit/96kHz (my guess is that the wireless connection is the problem there). Headless NUC, but Roon installed normally (with GUI, I mean).
I’ve never seen the Squeezebox Touch handle 176.4/192k over WiFi here either, even with <10ft line of sight to a top-end router. With an ethernet cable, it’s fine.
When I looked at it, my analysis pointed to the WiFi infrastructure in the SBT as the bottleneck. They just didn’t engineer the device to handle those data rates.
LMS streams to the SBT using FLAC, we stream PCM. It’s a side effect of how our respective audio systems work. PCM is a little bit heavier on the wire (but lighter on the CPU on both ends). It’s a tradeoff either way, but it might be working against you with a configuration like that.
That brings up another issue. The Enhanced Digital Output plugin for the Touch, as I recall, requires that the Touch be fed a FLAC stream. It sounds like you guys got around that. After the EDO plugin was first issued, the developers were supposed to later make it so you could feed a PCM stream, but I never saw it get to that point. I would have pointed to that limitation as the explanation for the Touch’s inability to play above 96kHz (in my current wireless setup), had you not mentioned that Roon feeds the Touch a PCM stream.
Anyway, thank you for supporting Squeezebox devices! I thought I was going to have to abandon the Touch when I adopted Roon, and that I was going to have to build another PC to stream Roon to the home theater. Double bonus!!!
I just received a nice offer for a NUC with 16GB DDR3 RAM and with a decent 320 Intel SSD. However, it is powered by an Intel Rock Canyon Core i3-5010U running at 2.1ghz CPU.
Will this setup suffice for a decent/good headless roon experience with 15k tracks? or will there be performance issues, also with regard to high res/ DSD content?
I’m running an i3 NUC (NUC5i3RYK) with 8GB of ram, with 40K tracks stored on NAS. I experience no problems, unless a weird shuffle-all-tracks problem I described in the Support forum counts (keeps favoring the same albums and tracks, especially when I skip through a lot of songs in a row). And the NUC is even connected via WiFi…
However, I have been reading about that HQPlayer software that upsamples and converts your tracks on the fly to DSD or other hi-rez, and it seems that the level of resolution available to the system is limited by the processing power of the PC. If you want to go in that direction, you might consider a stronger CPU.
We are talking at “Dummies” level here: Do you mean a USB cable from a NUC socket to the USB input on the DAC? No refinements, no extra bits, just a straightforward USB cable between the two units?
Thanks very much. That’s the last piece of the jigsaw. I’m going to do a
NUC6i5SYH with 8GB RAM
500 GB nVME SSD
2.5 inch internal 2TB HDD
External DVD/CD writer
McIntosh C50 preamp
McIntosh MC402 power
Wilson Benesch ACT speakers
Elo touchscreen.
There was a time when getting good music involved only the simple use of over-priced consumer devices. All this talk of NUCs and SSDs and Roon bridges etc. just makes it a completely different ball game. If my solution above works, that will be it for life. Don’t care what new enhancements they do on Roon, its fantastic enough for me already!