I fully agree, the TDP to performance ratio is stunningly good, and even on the ordinary NUC the fan is nearly inaudible.
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NO! I would spend the money replacoing the SONOS devices. What SONOS speakers do you have? I fell out with SONOS after the last update debacle so goodbye BEAM and hello Sonus Faber Omnia (Roon Ready) for example.
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Yes! Replacing my SONOS devices is a much higher priority than getting a Titan. I have quite a few such speakers. I recently replaced a Sonos Port with a Bluesound ICON that performs exactly the same function, except it is “Roon Ready”. To replace a Sonos FIVE speaker I might consider one of the Bluesound ICON+bookshelf speaker packages. Or, I might try to find a single wifi-enabled powered speaker that is also Roon Ready. But I’m trying to be a little budget-conscious because I have three Sonos FIVEs. For my living room I’m willing to spend more, but for the kitchen or a bedroom, less. At the end of the day SONOS is entirely gone, and all my hardware is non-proprietary.
So far so good! Roon+TIDAL has been awesome and the app experience is so much better. The fact that Sonos completely bailed on indexing my local music library was annoying. But the real deal breaker started quite a long time before the last update, where the Sonos idea of a search function is to pile all their preferred “special just for you!” radio stations and mixes on top of what you’re actually looking for.
If you have 2 sonos 5s as a stereo pair you could think about upgrade to the Sonus Faber Duetto as a wireless roon ready alternative 
PS. I dont have any connection to SF but I live in Italy and use some of their products.
The titan costs the same as 8 nucleus ones. What do you think?
Fanless, always.
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I just use each sonos 5 as an individual speaker.
This raises an interesting point. In the Roon app I don’t see any setting for a roon-ready device that specifies sending stereo or mono to that device. I have a Bluesound NODE that is streaming to two separate speakers right now, but I couldn’t tell you if I’m getting stereo out or not.
One alternative that I’ve found performs extremely well is the Topton FU02 passively cooled mini pc. I specced it with a Ryzen 7730U, 32GB RAM, 500GB Crucial NVME SSD for ROCK/database, 4TB Crucial SATA SSD for media.I stripped out the Wi-Fi card and disabled all integrated audio in the BIOS and power with a 19V linear power supply.
It runs warm to the touch unless you’re copying a large amount of data across to the media share it can be really very hot so during that initial data transfer I set up a floor fan blowing onto it. Probably unnecessary but better safe than sorry. Not needed in normal operation, it’s just SSD’s generate quite a bit of heat during sustained write operations.
II find processing speed to my Silent Angel Munich MU end point to generally vary from between 66x to 84x when I’ve looked which strikes me as decent. i3 1315U has about 20-25% better single threaded performance so I expect that would probably be over 100x with Titan though at more than 3.5x the price I think my ROCK (or MOCK) is a far better value proposition.
My understanding is the added multithreaded performance only really applies for multi zone streaming, upsampling and DSP operations and thats the area the 7730U shines vs i3 1315U so I don’t really expect this thing to run out of steam anytime soon.
I’ve been impressed with it in actual use finding the responsiveness to be literally instant. Click play, skip, pause or skip ahead in a track and it’s instant. No split second waiting for it to do anything. This I find somewhat mind blowing considering 5 years ago when I ran Aurdirvana or Jriver locally from another (Ryzen 2750?) mini pc it was significantly less responsive, so for the ROCK in the garage (along with router, switch and NAS) to be this responsive really impresses me.
If they update the FU02 to take a Ryzen 7840U I’d be tempted to upgrade given its single core performance difference is even greater than that between my 7730U and i3 1315U. That said… What I have is already overkill.
Just thought I’d share as Titan really isn’t the only game in town for those requiring completely silent operation and a fair bit of grunt.
A very technical view , the Titan is a black box for people who don’t have or don’t need any technical know-how.
If you have the DIY ability use it
If not buy a BOX …2 very different use cases
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Indeed, I will soon get a new Mac Studio and could easily use my current Mac Mini as a Roon Core but that means another system to maintain.
The Nucleus is simply no maintenance for me. Push a button when there’s a new update and that’s it.
No security or backup software to update and keep an eye on, no OS updates, etc…
Backup of the library is handled automatically by Roon to two different Synologys.
Backup of the music files is handled automatically by the Synologys one which in turn backs up the files and library to a Hetzner account.
I never have to look at it.
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