The shift to small, single-purpose devices (wonkish)

Roon Software Discussion
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I like to use computers as a “proof of concept” type of device. In other words, full featured computers are a good way to implement a given application or feature, since it is already there, and capable of having the feature added by some relatively simple combination of software and specialized hardware. It’s a good way to test whether one would enjoy that application or feature, and live with it for a while. If it becomes part of the habit, then one can invest in the dedicated device.

I have also found that general purpose computers are easier to upgrade than single purpose devices. This is a broad generalization with many exceptions. This is one reason that I use the Swiss army knife of a general purpose computer first to implement a function or feature – often times the early versions of single purpose devices become obsolete - under powered or not fully compatible with the whole whatever it is – by the time that function or feature is mature and widely adopted. As a serial early adopter, I’d rather adopt early with a multi-purpose computer, then wait out the first generation of single purpose devices, and then when those devices become perfected, I’ll jump in.

I also do not see people giving up their smartphones any time soon and going back to single purpose devices like carrying a camera, watch, cell phone, reading tablet, etc. Smartphones are small but they are little general purpose computers, not little single-purpose devices.

Bottom line, there are different uses for each, and in some ways each represent a different stage of development of a given application. Two sides of the same coin. Both are necessary and will be for the foreseeable future.

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43

Anders, I think your perspective is the direction we’re headed. But in the near term, most folks have perfectly good regular computers (for me it’s a Mac) that are just fine for serving up music via the very nicely done Roon SW. I combine cloud and local media and the Mac handles that just fine. Everything (with an occasional glitch) “just works”. I of course control the multi-room setup via an iPhones or iPads, and occasionally directly via the Mac, but the Mac is the server for the files (some endpoints USB connected, some network connected). Again, not extra money was needed to be spent for the server and the endpoints can be changed or added as needed. My main limitation is that when traveling I must still have my Mac with me otherwise I can’t use Roon. I can still use the Tidal and even some local files that play directly via a smartphone, but can’t run Roon. I’m hoping that will be enabled soon as these devices are getting powerful enough to truly run Roon.

So in short I sense we’re in the middle of the transition you describe Anders, but not there yet necessarily for the average person.

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I think you have it, my wife was getting fed up of carrying a handbag full of devices

So she got a Samsung 7 in Tab that has phone, book app, internet etc and chose that size because that was the right size for her hands and handbag

When my kindle died I started to use my iPad to read, I already use it for most other general computing … mail, internet access

I have multitudes of laptops desktops etc but I use one as the core and the iPad for most else

Mike

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I’m not sure what point your post is trying to get across really :confused:

Appliances have been around for years. Where Roon gets it wrong (imo), isthe processing demand and overhead it asks for. In your description of single use

you have carefully omitted the two descriptions that typically accompany appliance-type single use systems: low cost and low power.

As much as I like Roon, it’s preposterous that the recommended Core is an i7 desktop processer. I know that the Roon team fundamentally disagree with me, but they should be doing much more to reduce this overhead. Especially if were going to espouse the ubiquitous, single-use model.

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Mike, I agree… I’m an iPhone guy myself, but Android and iOS are rough equivalents here - I’m very much looking forward to the rumored 6.5” iPhone coming this year. That’s about the right size for me. I have an iPad mini and it’s a bit too big for one handed use, but my current iPhone 7+ is a bit too small for reading, etc. I framed this ~6.5” size as being right several years ago, now we’re finally getting there in the Apple realm. Android is already there… One device as the main UI device for most everything and then having background servers or cloud to serve up the content. And of course in some cases (with large storage), we can have lots of content right on our smartphones. My iPhone already has 250 GBytes of storage. Rumors of a 512GB iPhone maybe next year…

No stopping this trend until we get to wearables (smartglasses with built in headphones). Tech is not boring these days although it still moves a bit too slow for my tastes :slight_smile:

-Bob

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First, wrt Roon’s architecture: I’m not sure I agree. People ask for more and more ambitious stuff, like simultaneous DSD256 upsampling of different streams to multiple zones , and they require power, but if you think of a more basic functionality it requires much less. I just bought the base Nucleus, chose the i3 version based on the descriptions of capabilities, and it does convolution without trouble. Even does one DSD256 stream, although I dont use that. With PCM upsampling and 131k convolution the power factor was about 20. More fundamentally, the Roon architecture that puts the heavy lifting in the core means the endpoints can be minimal, and with my internal SSD I don’t need a NAS, so the overall expenditure is kep low.

Second, are you concerned about the hardware cost or electricity? Reducing hardware cost is of course an important goal, although the NUC cost is already so low… The Nucleus is more expensive, but as @Danny has pointed out, it is priced to make room for dealer profit — the hardware BOM is not the main problem.

But more fundamentally, my thesis is more concerned with saving a more scarce resource, human time and attention. And with allowing penetration beyond the small group of tech-savvy people we see here. What is much more preposterous than the i7 is all the troubles that people discuss in this forum.

I used to say that I couldn’t recommend Sooloos to any of my friends because candidates needed to be music lovers, tech-savvy and wealthy, a very small Venn diagram intersection. Roon has removed the wealth requirement, down to moderately affluent, but the tech requirements are still a barrier.

And I don’t want to futz around like this. Imagine you buy a BMW and you get the advice that to get it to perform you need to install a third party component that removes many functions from the vehicle, limiting its functionality and compatibility, and causing frequent failures. Ridiculous! (Ok, I have a friend who regularly “chips” his BMWs to get ultimate power, but he is viewed as an extremist, this is not the norm among regular customers.)

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Strange qoute from someone who has been in the IT buisiness for so long as you. Roon is easy to setup,.even for a novice. If Roon should went to single purpose machine Rock only I think it’s exit Roon for me. I like my multipurpose devices, I like the freedom of choosing the software I like to run side by side. I most definatly don’t want to get trapped in a Roon only eco system, I’ll pass along if it comes to that. That the reason I was never interested in Sooloos, got nothing to do with finance.

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And that’s OK, but you then have a single-use ‘lump’ which is when doing nothing seems like wanton excess. That doesn’t fit the definition of an appliance to me.

There’s nothing wrong with offering a pre-built solution, but it’s nothing new. Nor does it eliminate support questions.

Actually, I have another contention with the very first postulate.

Not so much in the home right now, but in fact the profound shift is towards virtualisation. And when you think about it, it makes more sense.
With something like the nucleus, you have a highly powered CPU, which is performing a single use, and when it isn’t doing so, is doing nothing.
Leaving aside a specific use case where a DAC is connected directly to the Nucleus, and looking at one where endpoints are in place, it makes much more sense to have a virtualised environment which makes much better use of the resources available.

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And yet numerous postings in these very forums would suggest otherwise. Whilst I like tinkering, an appliance approach also appeals. That’s the reason I’ve ended up with ROCK on a NUC.

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But it’s not about me.
Or you.
You and I are fine.
But that’s a tiny market.

Sonos is about 100X bigger than Roon.
For Roon to have the impact on the world that its conceptual innovations justify, we need to remove barriers.

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53

If Roon is hard for people I don’t know what’s easy. No pun intended but this is about computet audio. Yes there is some setup involved but I had a harder time setting up my new Tv, wich is a single purpose device btw, then setting up Roon. For sure it’s not a CD player, but even with a Nucleus there is as much setup.involved as with a windows setup. Still have to choose your endpoints etc, nothing changes in that. But really setting up Roon was no more then installing the softeare on my pc and ipad. Open the software, choose audio endpoint, e-voila done,.never looked at it further,.works instanly. No network configuration, nothing. What is a Nuclues goung to make easier about it?

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The discussion about Roon is interesting, but only a part of it.
My thesis was a broader perspective on technological evolution.
It was as much a paean to MicroRendu and Ropieee as the Nucleus.

And it was not really a statement about what Roon Labs should do, and how we like it, as it was a prediction of what the tech world will look like.
If people predict 20-50 internet connected devices by 2020, how many by 2050? If I say a trillion, would you say I’m crazy? 100 devices per human? Not all owned by the human, mind you — corporate, infrastructure, communications… Seems reasonable to me. And there won’t be a trillion multi-purpose, Windows/Mac/Unix style computers.

We will see. I hope to still be around, watching the industry, listening to music.

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Interesting point and I agree. And just counted…my small home with two people has 23 internet connected devices, and we’re not even that high tech (other than music). We don’t have any of the smart home stuff (yet), so if we added thermostats, lights, security cameras, etc. we could easily get to 50 in our household alone.

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Mesh solutions do not always work when you need to keep your internet provider’s box as a router (ex: here in France using the internet provider Free with multiple TVs connected). You may end up having two separate networks in your home. Anyway, the setup and configuration is far from simple, if at all feasible.

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I would assume the internet provider’s router has a wired jack as well as wireless, all the ones I have seen do. Then you can wire the mesh box to the router and set up that mesh, and ignore the router’s WiFi network. Maybe you can even turn it off, otherwise give it a name like DoNotUse and a hidden password.

That’s what I did. Don’t want the confusion of the WiFi networks. That’s the mess I had before, with the extenders, that’s exactly the mess that made me go with the Eero mesh.

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It is not that simple, unfortunately. Anyway, I ended up getting a Devolo GigaGate, which solved my networking problems and is pretty much “plug and play”. It is not as “powerful” as a mesh network, but it does the job. CPL was just no longer sufficient - teenagers take a lot bandwidth !

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I appreciate the OPs passion and personal revelations, and the outlining of the daunting user experience of the 60s something well-heeled businessman who wants to easily enter digital audio. Where are the audio FLACs coming from that are the basis of this whole Roon use case? Is Tidal seen as the insta-library in this case?

My current Win10Pro PC connected to my DAC is well-optimized and sounds killer, and I can play music on my main rig while using Office, Photoshop, browsing the net, and ripping of stereo and mutichannel Blu-rays, SACDs, and stereo CDs in addition to buying hi-res downloads on various websites, etc. Then there are also all the audio and video streaming apps.

For me the only compelling reason to adopt a Nucleus would a demonstrable sound quality improvement. A fanless design is great for those with loud fans and tight rack spaces, but many alternatives exist.

I’m honestly struggling to justify adding a dedicated Roon-only network streamer and how it would simplify my life, or that of the 60-something businessman starting from scratch with no digital music and who may not even own a DAC. Is the main target user someone who has no video or other app needs and maintains a library with a PC elsewhere?

Frans

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What I wrote is not about my personal desires. And just for reference, I have worked in the software industry for 45 years and was until recently a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. This was not about what I can do, but what I want to do. But more importantly, it was about the market in general. By your description of your system, you have defined yourself as a one-percenter in terms of technical competence. I don’t think computer experts is the niche Roon should focus on, I think a Roon should be aimed at music lovers, people who care about the music they listen to and the system they listen with, and a requirement for computer expertise is nothing but a barrier to success.

But I don’t want this to sound like a negative story, focused on the daunting challenges. I wanted to tell a positive story, a glowing vision of the new world. Computer power is becoming free, and this allows us to benefit from the awesome capabilities in ways that are unprecedented in terms of simplicity, convenience and ubiquity. What enables that was, of course, the awesome innovations in hardware and software and networking — but also, I argue, the shift to small, single-purpose devices.

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I consider myself quite tech savvy. In fact, I would even say I enjoy messing around with PCs and other tech. But, in the case of my music setup, I’d prefer not to spend unnecessary time fiddling with a computer which is exactly what I found myself doing in order to get a Roon endpoint to handle my multi channel music collection. If I had the money, I’d have gone the Nucleus route.

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I am late to the thread, but I am reminded of Cory Doctorow’s 2012 essay, “Lockdown: The Coming War on General Purpose Computing” which approaches the question of single-use computing appliances from a defense-of-intellectual-property-rghts perspective. Since Doctorow wrote that piece, we’ve seen the actual computation and storage of that property moved entirely up into the cloud, and the consumer now purchases or leases a device just smart enough to access the content they desire. One of the reasons I like Roon is the continued perception - a polite fiction perhaps, but I’ll take it - that I still own and control most of the atoms that manage and deliver my bits.