If this is the wrong forum for a pre-sales question, I apologize, and ask the moderator to move my post to the correct forum.
I have two Auralic Aries systems, hard-wired to my router and QNAP NAS, which is where my music library sits.
In the living room, I have an Aries femto streaming to a Schitt Audio Gungnir multibit which drives my McIntosh tube amp, a pair of Wilson Benesch speakers and a Rel sub.
In the kitchen, I have an Aries mini (also hard wired) driving a pair of KEF LS50 wireless speakers up high on the wall. (I also have an Aries mini and a Schitt DAC in my car, which works amazingly well, but is not part of this question.)
The only real issue I am having is that the Aries femto cannot stream music to both systems at once, as a zone, especially at high native resolution. I get drop outs, static etc. I have lots of bandwidth in the wired network, so I think it must be limitations with the Aries.
I control my devices using Auralic’s Lightning DS app, which is OK, except that it occasionally can’t find one of my devices.
If I were to go with Roon, I would need to end up with some form of headless server, because the CPU in my QNAP NAS is too old for good Roon performance, and I would also want to run headless.
Buying a new dedicated is a sizeable investment without a really good trial first.
Question 1: Would I be able to address my zone streaming issue with Roon? - bit-perfect streaming to two Roon-ready streamers?
Question 2: What would be a viable path be to trying Roon before plunking down money for a headless server? And is a week trial enough to get things working and tested?
Question 3: I am not a metadata guy, so Roon’s amazing handling of metadata will not likely sell me. Are there other sound/DSP aspects of Roon that I will find myself unable to live without?
Many thanks for tolerating this long post. Thank you for your thoughts.