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Curious to know your ROON hardware

ezra_s

ezra_s

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I am quite happy for now with my rasberry pi3 with digi hat for streaming (the pi4 I mentioned originally by mistake acts as a nas with a usb3 hdd plugged and a few other things since pi4 is such a little beast), but I am seeing everyone and their mother talks wonders about Roon in here so I'm wondering about trying it out, What kind of hardware do you use as ROON Core?

I am wondering If I can use an old i7-950 with 8 Gigabytes that I have laying around, if that can be enough, or If I should get some other hardware.

Please share your experience with me youd did to set a Roon Core machine assuming it is not your personal pc, as in, a machine you will have running 24x7. I tried to find a thread about this, but if there is sharing this kind of information please feel free to point me to it.
 
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ezra_s said:
I am quite happy for now with my rasberry pi4 with digi hat for streaming, but I am seeing everyone and their mother talks wonders about Roon in here so I'm wondering about trying it out, What kind of hardware do you use as ROON Core?

I am wondering If I can use an old i7-950 with 8 Gigabytes that I have laying around, if that can be enough, or If I should get some other hardware.

Please share your experience with me youd did to set a Roon Core machine assuming it is not your personal pc, as in, a machine you will have running 24x7. I tried to find a thread about this, but if there is sharing this kind of information please feel free to point me to it.
Click to expand...

4 year old amd something or other 1.8ghz. I upgraded the ram a bit (overkill at 16, think it was 8). About 20000 flac files on the hard drive and qobuz. Takes a bit to load up but fine in action. My gut feel is it's a crap HDD internally and the number of local files that slows it down. If I tell roon only to use qobuz it loads rapid.
 
I use a youthful 2009 Mac Mini with 4GB memory and a 512GB SSD, so I think your i7 will be more than adequate. Most Roon issues are networking related, rather than processing, unless you use HQ Player to do run some esoteric filters.
 
When I first started using Roon I got a used Intel NUC7i3BNH and installed the Roon ROCK operating system. It ran 24/7 and worked just fine, although the setup process had some hiccups and I ran into some issues with flash drives used for the database buck-ups dying.

A couple months ago I didn't want to pay for the Roon license renewal so I decided to try Plex. I installed Windows on the NUC and started using it for measurements with REW along with simulations using VituixCAD and adjustments with the miniDSP SHD plugin and Dirac Live. I liked being able to do all these things at my system with an always on and connected PC rather than using a laptop while having an always on server that was otherwise useless. Now I've switched back to Roon but I'm still using Windows. I like this method much more and I don't have to swap the USB cable from my server to a laptop to make updates and adjustments to the SHD. Here's hoping Roon certifies the SHD soon.
 
I use an older desktop with an i5-7400 processor. It also has several other services running, like Plex, Calibre, and standard windows file shares. I have a 24TB RAID 5 array for storage, and all of it is in a home-made rack down in my basement. Everything runs great but I bet an even older CPU would be just fine for Roon Core only.
 
i5-7500, 8gb ram, 256gb ssd boot drive, 2tb ssd data drive, Win10 pro. (Dell Precision tower previously used for a file/db server).
 
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Dell Precision Workstation, circa 2015. Xeon 1255v3 processor, 8gb ram, 480gb SSD for OS, 2tb platter for storage, runs headless in my home office closet with access through remote desktop. Running three different zones in Roon, all with multiple parametric eq bands, takes about 5-10% CPU power. I think it might be overkill, but I had it laying around, so why buy something else?
 
Core: 8700k oc'd to 5.2Ghz with 64GB RAM, an optane 900p system drive, and local storage on enterprise grade nvme PCIE cards.

USB to Benchmark Dac2 (system 1) and network to an Auralic Aries (system 2) to another Benchmark DAC2
 
ezra_s said:
I am seeing everyone and their mother talks wonders about Roon
Click to expand...
I don't. When evaluating Roon I set the core server up on my aging HP N54L server running OMV streaming to my NAD C658. Everything worked fine as such but I did not subscribe. I found Roon to be massively overrated and completely unneccessary. For the price they charge it's bordering on scammy for a glorified Allmusic scraper. Deserves the money-grabbing panther IMO.
 
32 core xeon 16 Gig ram, system and Roon app on ssd, 7 Tb mech storage. :)

I have run Roon on low power nas and laptops without issue. Just recommend an SSD for the database as this will make it more spritely.
 
My Roon Core is an ESXi virtual machine.
 
bluefuzz said:
I don't. When evaluating Roon I set the core server up on my aging HP N54L server running OMV streaming to my NAD C658. Everything worked fine as such but I did not subscribe. I found Roon to be massively overrated and completely unneccessary. For the price they charge it's bordering on scammy for a glorified Allmusic scraper. Deserves the money-grabbing panther IMO.
Click to expand...
Couldn't disagree more. :)
 
Really strongly depends on whether you intend doing some heavy-duty DSP in Roon. (I assume, on this forum, that no one is foolish enough to be upsampling to DSD512, or some other CPU-intensive but utterly worthless task.)

As long as you have a fast SSD, you can get pretty satisfactory performance from even very modest hardware. An Odroid H2+ with 8GB of dual channel RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD will run Roon Core very nicely, for less than the price of an "audiophile" USB cable.
 
The NAD C658 has become ROON certified. Roon server is now accessible directly from the BluOS app.
 
EB1000 said:
The NAD C658 has become ROON certified. Roon server is now accessible directly from the BluOS app.
Click to expand...

The OP already has a streamer he's happy with. He's looking for a machine to run Roon Core on.
 
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