NUC from amazon with all the goodies runs around $500. Depending on the size if the NAS and quality and raid config etc… $500 - $5000… but the NAS cost most are going to have anyway. I started with NUC and attached 2TB USB cheapo drive. Worked great. But then backup and new rips became maintenance nightmare. So I bought 4TB NAS, and 4TB USB backup drive. The NAS backups to USB drive, my old 2TB is the auto backup still on NUC. All in for everything less than $1500 and runs great. Running Roon on NAS works, but always read about hang ups and issues. I see the same with MACs and Windows. But I have a friend running Roon on dedicated $350 windows pc he bought and no issues. All I can say is Nucleus and NUC complains in the forums/FB seem to limited to how to setup. I think there is a way to add a 2nd drive to the NUC for storage (like the nucleus) but I wanted other things to be able to access and NAS was easiest way. Synology was super easy to setup and manage. Just my 2 cents.
With the delay in the Airlens I keep looking at other streamers even though I have a very good one. the all in one solutions (Roon, streamer, storage) peak my interest, but they are not cheap to get a good one. Airlens with my credit sitting there keeps saying just wait and compare to what you have. The Sonore is great, but its software bugs me and what seems to be incompatibility (yes I can use DOP) with MKII just does not sit well with me. also knowing dev will be tested first with Airlens makes me know it should always be compatible with MKII.
FWIW, my iMac hosts Roon Core and many of my digital library files.
Files are “served” via Wi-Fi to my router and a downstream Ethernet signal chain, tweaked with after-market power supplies for switches, media converters and a Gigabit LAN isolation gizmo.
My point is the iMac pretty much performs flawlessly with Roon (and as the host of my preferred SW for critical listening of files, JRiver Media Center).
I had the TS-473 anyway mainly for business. I didn’t buy it for Roon specifically, I just happened to have the one they recommend. I don’t store files on the QNAP. They are still on the Innuos.
As I already had the QNAP TS-473 I downloaded Roon Core, logged in and that was it. I use Innuos Sense in my main system. Roon in the rest of the house.
I had an older QNAP TS-451 when I bought the Innuos and it could not run Roon. If I’d had the TS-473, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the Innuos.
Yup, I am using the 2021 PSA USB driver. As I drove off this morning it occurred to me that the Windows audio manager on the MS-Surface might be set at 24-48k. And so it is. I just upped this to 24-352K and everything thru Plexamp on the MS-Surface to the MK2 via USB comes thru at 24-352K. But it does not sound good. I just flipped playback of the same items to Foobar using WASAPI and everything sounds much better, even if only 16-44 to the MK2. I love Plexamp in the car and on trains and planes. But since it has such features as “loudness levelling”, I assume it operates in PCM only. That Plex DLNA is giving me DSD distribution in the house is a separate also good reason to have Plex on my NAS.
Several brands of servers (Innuos, Melco, possibly others) provide an RJ45 socket as a data output option to your streamer. It offers electrical isolation and can handle any data stream. It works very well with Devialet. It is not an ethernet connection, for that I use the Devialet’s wireless capability, if needed (e.g. if someone wants to use airPlay or Spotify).
For some reason the RJ45 output did not work with Innuos Sense, they promised to fix it, but then implemented uPnP. That allows Innuos Sense to become a multi-room system.
Ah, yes, sloppy of me there. Did not mean ethernet itself but the cables associated with… Regarding which, going for higher numbers is not always the best idea as the added shielding itself can cause a ground loop. And one just does not need Cat 7 or 8 for music. I have stereo DSD512 and surround DSD64 going over Cat 6 fine.
Indeed, CAT6 is always the recommended option. CAT5 is perfectly fine.
I had a 25m long unused run of AQ Pearl. I chop bits off and terminate it. The copper conductors are quite a bit thicker than your average Amazon CAT6 cable, which also makes it a lot easier to get in the connector in the correct order.
The only problem I had with running long cables and terminating them is that you have to create a loop to test them, so you need another long cable to get back to where you started to do the test. My wife thought I was mad.
Steven, Assure you wife you are not mad. I recently hook up our new smart TV ( I question how smart ) with 75 feet of CAT8 Ethernet cable since I did not feel that the WiFi was reliable enough. Mind you it was not name brand cable, but it is very well made and as CAT8 is suppose to have twisted pairs each shielded and capable or delivering HD TV in 100 feet runs.
I plan to use the same cable in ready made shorter lengths for my storage and streamer gear. If I feel the need for name brand cable I will consult you guys for what is best.
I’m backing up to a different disk partition on the server. It’s the same server running the roon database and storing my media files.
The physical server is a Dell R730xd with an Intel Xeon 28-core CPU, and 128G RAM, running Vmware Esxi 7.0. The server NIC has four 1Gbps ethernet jacks that are pooled. All four connections feed into a Cisco Catalyst 2975 48 port switch functioning as my network backbone.
The Windows server 2019 runs as a VM on ESXi. It has eight cores and 24G of ram. The RAID 5 array is managed by an actual hardware RAID controller and it stores Roon database as well as the media files. It is approximately ~50% full with a current max of 15TB.
There is one other VM on the server that has eight cores and 20G of ram.
There are no issues with the server capacity.
There were no dropouts when the streaming went from the server directly to the bridge in the MK1, even when backups of the NUC were running.
Either the backup is saturating the single network port on the NUC or the process of figuring out what to back up is saturating the CPU or both.
At this time, I’m considering the following:
Throw in the towel and keep the NUC powered 24x7, running backups while I sleep. This is clearly the least expensive option and the one that I will most likely end up using
Purchase a new NUC and use it as a dedicated Roon streamer. I don’t want to manage yet another computer, so this is not likely to come to pass.
Purchase a purpose-built streamer like the Holo Red, or something else. Depending on reviews, and whether or not I think it will be enough of a SQ improvement over the NUC in option 1, I may choose to go this way.
As it appears from Paul’s last post on the issue that the AirLens is now basically a Conversdigital CDM4140 in a case with an SMPS power supply then getting it to market with all the features the module is capable of shouldn’t have been as difficult of a proposition as it’s turned out to. Unless this is the latest and last resort to actually get an AirLens device to market and was not at all what was originally intended even after Octave was cancelled.