Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Hardware with Roon Application Roon Hardware Options

FWIW, Danny from Roon has talked about tablets being able to run as fully fledged cores, but he was referring to hardware specs in a couple of years' time.

Personally I think it is asking a lot to run the full package on a device like that. It's not really what they were designed for.

A cheap(ish) NUC connected via ethernet RJ45 leaving the SP3 as a multi-purpose control only would make more sense (IMHO).

Just to be clear guys, some of the Surface Pro 3's have specs equal to or greater than those specified by Roon... and better than many laptops that others might be running Roon on... as well as being better spec'd than most NUC's out there.

Minimum is Core i3... and also options for i5 and i7... as well as up to 8GB of RAM.

Albert hasn't said which SP3 he has, but it should be ok for testing... with a NUC or Mini being more flexible for longer term use.

I would also add that in my testing, that more hardware specs are required at the Remote end than at the Roon Server end.

This is likely due to the Graphical nature of Roon and the fact that it relies a lot on OpenGL, which in turn relies on a reasonable GPU... which is not necessarily a requirement for a Server, which many times is "headless" anyway [without a display attached].

I've just discovered that my 2012 i5 Mac Mini can handle up to 16GB of RAM (was running 4GB previously). The original spec only suggested that 8GB was supported.

Since my Mac Mini is far more stable than my i7 iMac (despite telling it never to switch off it frequently does) I'm tempted to move my Roon set up to a headless Mac Mini and run the Roon remotely on my iMac.

Sounds like a perfect plan, it was I would do.

Russ

A quick update.
I just tried it on my i5 4GB Surface Pro 3 through wifi as core control and storage. It works good, tracks switched instantly.

Where is the volume set?

Yeah, many of the Macs are capable of supporting more Ram than Apple "recommend"........very much akin to Meridian and disk size in the MD600 for example

MacTracker from the App store is a very useful app for telling you what your Mac can actually support in real life.......and sites like Crucial and others will also tell you what you Mac can support

Care sometimes needs to be taken, as the Mac may be able to support higher capacities in some slots than others.......leading to some "weird" combinations of 6Gb and 12Gb being the max possible.....again that app and the sites will help with that info

Do you mind my asking what Processor is in your Mac Mini??

Also, IMHO if you are committing to using it as your Roon Server, then it would definitely benefit from upgrading the Drive to SSD

You could add a 2nd drive to the Mini, but Roon has to run on the OS drive I believe

The Roon Database with all the Metadata etc., is kept on the OS Drive......and as such Roon would benefit from such an upgrade

Samsung 850 Evo SSD's 250Gb on Amazon for £78.......with 500Gb being about about twice that

With 250Gb being more than enough for Roon and OS, this would be a very significant upgrade for £78 IMHO.......most likely more than you would get from the extra 8Gb of Ram you speak of above, unless you have a VERY large number of albums........even though extra Ram never goes astray in the long run IMHO

Food for thought!

I mind very much. Can't believe how rude some folks are on HHers these days...

Actually it's a Mid 2011 2.5GHz i5. Don't disagree with you about the SSD. I had one installed in the iMac and it made a huge difference. That said the Mac Mini startup was a lot quicker post the RAM upgrade.

Ultimately it depends where I'm going to use the Mac Mini. At present the children use it for homework etc. I could run Plex on it as well and retire the Dune Smart players. That would give me more options for iPlayers and other VOD apps than I presently have.

So you're saying put another MAC near the DAC?

(In my opinion the DAC I have sounds a lot better than an MS200 or a MS600. The DAC stays.)

The benefit of Roon is it has "Exclusive" mode, which takes over the audio out of the PC/Mac. With my Prime Headphone Amp I paired it with an MS200 because running USB from my iMac to the Prime meant I had to manually change the sampling frequency on the computer to allow native output of whatever I was playing. What a PITA.

In exclusive mode Roon automatically changes the sample rate of my iMac to the optimal output (ie no suboptimal upsampling) so I can get the full benefit of the Prime's audio. This means I can redeploy my MS200 elsewhere.

So you can keep your DAC and feed it with an asynchronous USB SPDIF cable for the full effect.