My DAC manufacturer is expecting to become a ROON partner shortly.
Should I wait till my DAC manufacturer becomes a partner before I undertake the free Roon trial to get the full benefit of Roon?
I would be using Roon on my MacBook Pro with an external DAC to PreAmp to Amp and Speakers.
If I purchase a new desktop computer can I instal Roon on the new computer?
Is there any advantage running Roon on a 8 core in lieu of 4 core CPU?
Hi John,
If your DAC manufacturer is going to implement Roon Ready then you will be able to connect to your DAC over the network. This is the best way to connect as it isolates the DAC from noise/processing issues in the computer.
Until then and depending on the inputs your DAC has, you could connect by a direct connection (SPDIF coax, TOSlink or USB), try out Roon and then upgrade to Roon Ready when it becomes available.
A single Roon licence enables you to run one Core and as many Controls as you like. A Roon installation that is a Control for a Core is sometimes called a Remote. You can move your Core to whatever computer you prefer, but only one can run the Core at a time.
You can find out more about the Roon architecture in this Knowledge Base page.
An 8 core CPU will analyse your library faster when initially installing Roon (if you set it to Fast in Settings) but you won’t see any great difference between 8 cores and 4 cores on playback.
Run the Roon trial now. When you are ready to try again contact Roon and they can activate another trial period.
Power is beneficial so you are looking at i3-i5 on a NUC. This will be appear as 4 cores in Roon (2 physical cores with hyperthreading). That will do for 90% of library sizes and various other circumstances such as number of endpoints and DSP. And later NUCs will support ROCK which will be a dedicated OS for Roon so no need to splash cash on Windows or take a crash course in Linux.