We do tend to spend a lot of time on these boards don’t we? Lol Well, thanks for yours and your honest advice. You make excellent points. Convolution? Great. Here goes another few hours of research… But I like it. With that said, and along the lines of capability/future proof/etc, is the sonicT i5 enough capacity? Again, no library. Purely Tidal HiFi streaming and DSP functions. Wonder if there will be a full MQA software solution? And if so, will i5 be up to the task?
Personally I use a NUC and ROCK on 7i7BNH 16gb ram and 256gb m.2 ssd (smallest I could buy at the time) and I put it in a fanless chassis. I do upsampling to dsd512 and it is adequate. I can’t comment on the ST units as I don’t have one.
Which fanless chassis do you use? Looked at quite a few but could not find any that suited the 7i7BNH. Am using the same NUC with a similar congifuration as yours but could not find a suitable chassis. Hoping you can point me in the right direction. Thanks!
There is a lot of concern here about arcane fine tuning: SonicTransporter vs. NUC sound quality, DSD512 upsampling, fanless chassis, bla bla bla. Don’t worry about all that. It’s for cork sniffers.
A bog standard i5 NUC with Windows, or an i5 SonicTransporter, will work fine for you. DSD512 is extremism, and not too many DACs support it anyway. Wrt the fan, if it’s networked you can put it elsewhere, and if you need to put it in the same room — I put mine behind a chair, never heard a thing unless I crept up on it. Just chill.
Or if you want perfection, and don’t have the skills — that’s why they make the Nucleus.
EDIT I had an i5 NUC, when I replaced it with a Nucleus I went with the i3, it has plenty of capacity to play high res music with room correction DSP, could do several rooms with different music (but I don’t), can do DSD256 (but I don’t). 3000 albums.
Alaska Plato x7 I think it is…not perfect but it’s working ok. If I’m doing a full import or restore maybe I’ll blow a fan or laptop cooler on or under it.
I picked up a new NUC 7i5BNH with 256gb drive and 8gb ram pre-installed off eBay for $340. Hooked it up to our TV with an HDMI cable (you’ll need a wired keyboard as well, and maybe mouse) and within 15 minutes had ROCK installed, bios set, etc, all of which I’d never done before (always a Mac guy). 1tb external drive with 640gb of my ripped music on it. But if you want to spend big bucks who am I to tell you not to? I just think you might be overthinking it and the amount of difficulty…
And oh, the NUC powered by a 12v 5a LPS, beat the sound quality of the 2013 Mac Pro I’d had the trial Core running on. No contest. I did some research, and i5 seemed the sweet spot as far as speed, price, low power, heat etc. If you have the $, then the St i5 is a good option - I ran a small green computer microVortexbox for years and it’s a good company to deal with.
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Thanks! I guess you are referring to the Akasa Plato X 7. I was looking at this one as well but put it off due to conflicting reports: PC MAG claimed it was ok for the 7i7BNH NUC. Quiet PC in the UK is selling these and I sent them an inquiry and they said it won’t work for the 7i7BNH. So a bit confused here! Seems like since it is working for you, I may give it a shot! Not too many fanless cases suited for the 7i7BNH.
This does look like the sweet spot. I have built a 3 different PCs repurposed from my office post retirement. Why 3, because they were available to try out and see how much power they consumed. All were in the 2013 generation i7, small platform business Dell or Lenovo PC. I added SSD for both ROCK and music storage, well I had the drives already.
The NUC ‘tall’ model looks nice for the money, probably uses less power, has enough CPU to convol (my DAC upsamples by design in FPGA) so i5 is plenty.
I would encourage the OP to get a NUC and load up ROCK, it’s really not more than an afternoon of learning to get the parts assembled and be listening to music. Then you can continue the learning of Roon options, there are so many topics to explore it can be overwhelming at first. Most important part is listening to music.
sonicTranspoter i5 would be a great solution for you.
@nstzya Here are some quick point that will answer some of the questions asked in this thread
The sonicTranspoter i5 has…
- Full 1 year warranty and phone support to help you get it running.
- Faster then an i3
- Fanless design (unlike an NUC witch has a small fan)
- Runs most DSP plug-ins great. Unless you want to upsample everything to DSD512 the i5 is great for almost anything you want to do.
- You need a Roon Server even if you are just using TIDAL.
The sonicTransporter has a lot of other audio apps you can install such as HQPlayer. This is an advantage over ROCK on an NUC.