Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming At the crossroads

Having been waiting around for a few months for Meridian to come up with a solution for the problems regarding Tidal I have been advised to look at Roon as an alternative.

Reading the posts on the forum regarding Roon most people see that there are few alternatives if they want to continue streaming Tidal in their Meridian systems. Changing over will certainly involve an extra outlay that some are not prepared to pay; personally I am OK with that as long as does not break the bank.

The most reliable route seems to be a Roon Nucleus with or without internal SSD about €1500, = here in the Netherlands plus the cost of a SSD and licence.

8th Gen NUC with SSD and 8GB RAM plus Roon lifetime or monthly subscription ± €1200, = with Roon lifetime.

Possibly a Meridian 210 at €950, = plus the cost of a USB attached drive and Roon licence.

Browsing the web last night I came across a possible alternative in the Elac DS-101-G this streamer costs about €1000,= in the Netherlands and comes complete with Roon Essentials already installed, so nothing else to pay apart from a USB drive. As Roon Essentials has recently been updated to version 1.7 this is possibility a readymade solution for me as I was quite happy with Sooloos as it was and don’t think I really need the full Roon. Could this directly replace my MD600?

Any advice would be appreciated because I have never found it necessary to look at Roon as a streaming system so I am wandering around in the dark at the moment.
Regards,
Fred

I am using a 2010 Mac Mini $200 USD with internal SSD and external 2TB SSD Thunderbolt drive($200).
I have the Roon Lifetime ($$$). The setup flawless serves (4) MS200 (2) 861+ID40 (4) zones from Ensemble and (4) ATV.
Although I use Qobuz, it worked equally well with Tidal.

The 210’s USB input is UPnP, and is therefore not compatible with Roon.

The UPnP input is provided for those that simply utilise the 210 as a UPnP Server.

If you do buy a Nucleus/+ very little effort is required to install an internal SSD.

The 210 will effortlessly access your Nucleus.

Alternatively, an Intel NUC is considerably cheaper than the Nucleus if budget is an issue - even when adding an SSD.

I tend to agree with spinal tap. I used to run Sooloos and squeezebox LMS and like the OP was looking for some future proofing after the lack of support for Sooloos.
Purchased a second hand high spec NUC from a well known auction site (£200) installed roon rock OS with free licence, within 4-5 hours i was up and streaming to 218, 861v4/ID40 and a Source 1.
The roon rock NUC can see the music files on my raspberry pi based server and even my twin store.
Overall very impressed with roon/tidal integration, not quite as user friendly as Sooloos but I am getting more used to it. So much so I have now bought a licence.
The change over to roon can be done at a reasonable cost.
As a side note I have also tried a raspberry pi with a hifi berry DAC running the hifiberry OS and had favourable results as a cheap Roon RAAT endpoint.

@Brytech

ROCK looks interesting I shall investigate further. We already use Intel NUC’s as our main computers with two SSD's installed. I assume that this is the sort of the setup that you use? A small SSD for the program and a larger one for the data.

Regards,
Fred

Hi Fred,

Yes what you describe would work fine ... Personally I prefer to keep the data i.e. music files on another device such as a NAS, that way you can run a suitable automated backup regime in case of drive failure.

I built some years ago a "music server" based on a Raspberry Pi with two 1.5TB drives (they are effectively mirror images of each other) the ROCK reads the data from this and also my existing Sooloos TwinStore.

So far I have not experienced any problems, other than those caused by my own tinkering lol

If you have a spare NUC give it a go ... the ROCK OS is very easy to set up and the Roon forum I found to be most useful.

Hi Brytec,

Thanks for your advice, its looking more and more likely that I will go down this route, it’s just a question of what to buy. I use Samsung USB drives to back up our computers so I am familiar with doing a backup that way.

It interesting to see that Roon Rock is reading data from your twin store would it also read from my MD600?

Regards,
Fred

Hi

I just used the Mac Mini I already had in my home office. The FLAC music files were already stored on its internal drive and backed up. Once I paid the subscription and downloaded Roon it found all the endpoints and has worked ever since.

So the only cost was the subscription.

Neil

If running on a NUC with ROCK, an external USB drive works great for music library. The NUC can also act as a SMB server so you can copy to/from it just like any other NAS.

Hi Fred,

I see no reason why it wont pick up your MD600.

Try the following \\192.168.0.104\music\music2\album

Obviously replace the IP address with the IP address of your media drive

Regards
Martin

I built my own 'fanless' NUC using a retail NUC and an Akasa case.

I put in a small M.2 drive for ROCK OS and decided to use a bigger internal SSD for my music library.

This was a cost effective solution and works well.

ROCK info and which processor you'll need for different library size/DSP requirements, etc., here.

In terms of backups, Roon has it's own automated backup solution built-in - you set up your schedule and point it at your backup locations, either locally or on your network (so e.g. your NAS).

If you don't need fanless (if the NUC/ROCK will be in another room for example) then don't bother with it, as it doesn't affect sound quality as far as I can tell.

Alternatively, if you have an old PC or Mac lying around, they will likely run Roon and sound the same if they are installed outside the listening room. Again, you do need to take into account your library size, number of zones you might use simultaneously, and whether you will be using DSP/DSD upsampling, etc., (Roon minimum requirements).

Those backups are only the database, not the music library. You will still need to maintain a backup of the music library.

If using external USB, that can be a simple offline copy of the music folder from the drive, or, can be done whilst online via a network copy using the NUC as a network device.

If using internal drive for music, ROCK takes over the drive management. So even forgetting the not so straight forward access to the drive, access to the music folders is not quite as simple as just being a generic music folder that you can pretty much do what you want with. If you stick with the external local USB option vs remote NAS, you also get benefits from the music library being instantly to hand, such as when undertaking content changes to the library.