Nuc7i5 with 2TB internal harddrive for music storage.
Macmini into a Chord Hugo DAC. Excellent.
Like many here I’m using a Mac Mini. It is an old one (circa 2009) that I can’t even upgrade to latest OSX. It was just collecting dust until I put Roon Core on there. It is adequate for my needs, silent and I didn’t need to buy anything else.
The other nice thing about the older Mac Minis is that the headphone out doubles as optical SPDIF out so you can feed a DAC (like an NAD or other) digitally. Pretty cool.
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Sonic Transporter i5 (Small Green Computer) for me as well. Previously dedicated PC. Really happy with the change
My new Dell PowerEdge T30 Xeon E3-1225V5 is up and running. Ended up paying £330 for this server, which includes the Xeon processor, 8GB ECC, 1TB SATA drive and a DVD/RW drive. I installed Ubuntu 16.04 on an SSD and used the 1TB as a temporary music store for Roon while I take a local backup from my old server before moving the ZFS mirror.
It’s fairly compact and quiet … I’ll move it out of the way once I’ve finished my set-up.
Graphs showing Roon serving a single endpoint (Tidal traffic.)
NUC i5 with Windows 10, with an internal SSD.
Completely standard.
Got a SonicOrbiter but never used it, some quirks with managing storage, and there was no incentive because the NUC worked fine.
I am just in the process of migrating to a Nucleus, again with internal SSD.
This is because I’m interested in how a dedicated, single-purpose device can better a general purpose computer.
I am totally focused on simplicity and reliability and lack of management.
Should be as simple as an FM tuner from the 70s.
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What quirks managing storage?
As I recall, it was a while ago…
I copied the content from my Windows-based staging machine, which had a copy of the NUC library.
The SonicOrbiter advertises that it exposes an SMB share, so I could copy from Windows like any other operation, drag and drop.
(ROCK and Nucleus do the same thing, I can use drag and drop or Robocopy for more robustness; I don’t think I used Robocopy with the SonicOrbiter.)
But when I copied things over, it went in pieces, for various practical reasons, maybe because of interruptions, maybe because I had the contents in fragments.
With Windows copying to SMB shares, I don’t worry about duplicates, because if I copy a bunch of stuff and some of it is already there, Windows stops and asks before it overwrites it.
But with the SonicOrbiter it didn’t do that, it copied in duplicates with mangled names (the file name, my user name, timestamp, the word “conflict”). I can’t imagine a circumstance where that would be useful.
Robocopy of course allows you to specify the behavior you want. Drag and drop involves the user, which is not good in the middle of the night.
Cleaning this up was cumbersome.
i’m sure I could have avoided this behavior, but I had little incentive to do any fiddling since the NUC worked well. And in my limited testing, the SonicOrbiter appeared to slow down the user experience. So I put it on the shelf.
It is possible this evaluation is unfair. I make no claims otherwise. Just telling what happened.
(I have now recycled the 2 TB SSD from the SonicOrbiter to the Nucleus.)
i5 also. Silent, pre-loaded with software, its just a box that you don’t have to deal with.
NUC7i7BNH running ROCK
Custom 4th gen i3 4330 with 4gb Ram and 128Gb SSD, External CD drive for ripping,Vortexbox OS. When the money allows possibly thinking of upgrading to i5 nuc.
Interesting that there are no Elac or Innuos cores mentioned here. I find the Elac and Zen Mini quite tempting for a zero-effort setup.
How well does the processor handle more intensive stuff like DSP or oversampling?
ok thanks appreciate the reply
Just back from a business trip … I’ll give it a try. I don’t use DSP, so what do you have in mind?
Say PCM converted and upsampled to DSD 256 or something?
If it’s a hassle; don’t worry. Was just wondering.
I’ll give it a go over the weekend once all software is installed.
sonictransporter i5 here as well. I’m happy with it.