Some people say that installing Roon Server on a flagship NAS is not as good as having a ROCK NUC, because the NAS cannot set process priority. They claim that the standard process priority can cause music to stutter or drop out, affecting sound quality, and that Roon requires the highest possible priority to ensure audio performance. Therefore, they recommend using ROCK instead of a NAS.
Is what they say correct? Why?
Roon does not “require” a higher process priority normally. But that goes for any normally task prioritized operating system (Windows, Mac and Linux).
I have run Roon on a decently specc’ed QNAP a few years back and it didn’t cause any of the effects you describe, even without manipulating priorities.
That said, i have since a few years back decided that the Roon process on my headless/fanless Windows server should have a higher priority than any maintenance task for latency reasons. This has never ever resulted in any dropouts or failures to deliver the stream to my endpoints though. It may have increased sound quality, but i’d never wager on that. (It may have given me a better satisfactory feeling)
The flip side of the coin is that a NAS is a host of many other chores, and the Roon ROCK/Nuclei are “one trick pony’s”, which is why i would always recommend ROCK to anyone even remotely uninterested in maintaining a desktop OS and that includes a NAS.