Roon, Server PC and Client PC set up

I’m interested in setting up a system where a server pc is dedicated to the Roon Core and the Covolution engine for Acourate digital room correction software. I’m using a Lumin Dac/streamer for Tidal and the Lumin L1 NAS for stored music. The Lumin is “Roon Ready” so no room bridge is needed. I want to hardwire throughout with ethernet cable.

These are the first questions that occur to me:

– Is there any reason why a Mac Pro tower (older models circa 2010-12) would not work well for this? I’m thinking a quad 4 or 6 cpu, at least 16 gb ram, SSD boot and whatever else would optimize it’s performance for this task. The Mac Pro is very quiet. I’m curious why, from I’ve read elsewhere, that it’s doesn’t seem to be considered as the server solution? The description of the PC’s is that they are noisy with fans.

Mac Mini for the Client Server. Connect a monitor to this. Or, a
Mac Pro notebook?

Ethernet to Router.

Router ethernet to Lumin

– Add a Cuda card to Mac Pro Server?

–Use a Linear Power Supply for Server?

– Any difference in performance of different ethernet routers?

Any suggestions? Thanks

Good luck finding MacOS drivers for recent-model Nvidia cards (but I don’t think you need CUDA unless you’re going to use HQP for upsampling to DSD512 (tricky with MacOS).

As far as noise goes, while these machines are not the noisiest things in the world, you (or at least I) can definitely hear fan noise. I guess it depends on your room acoustics, how far away you sit, and how sensitive you are to the noise. Performance-wise, I think an “old” multi-core Mac Pro should be fine.

This seems like more of a PITA than it’s worth, IMO. You might be better off getting the Mac Pro out of the listening room.

Unsolicited tip: One of these will make the Mac Pro fly like the wind. I have one (the older version), and it’s been trouble free. Doesn’t make any noise. :slight_smile:

Thanks David,

My Mac Pro makes about 3 db in fan noise from 2’ away.
The fan from the hvac overwhelms it with 10db. The server Mac
will be 20 to 30’away, so no noise issue there. Are the comparable PC
louder?

Would you use the Accelsior solid state drive as the boot drive?
Would you ideally use 2 solid state drives to handle the Roon Core and Acourate Covolution engine? Or could everything be sitting
on one drive?

In terms of big towers with fans, I’d guess that your Mac Pro is at the low end of scale.

This is what I do on mine (my work machine). It contains all the OS stuff and all my applications.

I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by using multiple SSDs. (Obviously, you want to be careful about backing up any drive that contains a lot of important stuff.)

I’m definitely not an expert on digital room correction — I mostly just read about it — but I have a couple of questions and comments for you:

Acourate is Windows only, right? So how do you see that working out in practice?

Do you need the Acourate (or any other) convolution engine running alongside Roon in real time? Don’t you want to use your DRC tool(s) to generate WAV files containing the convolution info that you can plug into Roon? (See, e.g., this very interesting thread.)

You’re right, it is a Windows program. I believe it can be run in Parallels, but I don’t know if that’s at a compromise.