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

Hi,

At present l am using an Innuos Zen Mk3 as my Roon Core to the 210 etc.

The Zen does include a 1TB hard drive to which l have loaded about a dozen CD’s but which are duplicated on Tidal or Qobuz so really not needed.

As such would l be better getting a dedicated Roon Source and moving on the Zen and if so what are the better units out there?

Ta

Colin 🤔
Relham

Many on here own an oven-ready Nucleus/+. Equally, many on here bought a DIY Intel NUC, added their own SSD’s plus basic programming to enable Roon Rock. Both camps appear to be pleased with their respective choice.

While I have no plans to change my own ROCK NUC anytime soon, if I had to make a new purchase today I would buy the latest M2 powered Mac Mini. While it wouldn’t be able to run ROCK it would be able to run vanilla Roon Core without issue - and would be cheaper than buying and configuring a NUC.

I have a NUC running ROCK which was a DIY job but not by me; an ex HH kindly formatted it all for me at the cost of his own time. He told me what to buy & that was my only contribution.

It works well but takes a while (10 minutes?) to come to life after being turned off & I sometimes get a fair bit of fan noise, even when Roon isn't playing, which seems odd to me.

Sounds like something's amiss. I've just rebooted my ROCK NUC... the ROCK interface is available in under 5 seconds, and the Roon app reconnects and is ready to play in 45 seconds.

I did once try to stress it out by playing/decoding four different MQA streams at once to four different end points... didn't cause any issue and still had loads of headroom.

Mine isn't very high spec - a 3yo 8th gen Core i3.

S

I used to have a ROCK (on a machine I put together myself) and found it booted pretty much instantly. Roon became available on the network within seconds of the machine booting.

There's no way it should take ten minutes. I'd take a look in the log files as that might hint where things are getting stuck.

I'd agree that 10 minutes does feel like a fair time, but after speaking to other Roon users with equivalent size libraries, I am happy the performance is in spec.

I was also advised against turning the thing off which I'd taken to doing to try to stay on the right side of Greta, so I'll leave the thing to its own devices in future.

My NUC becomes near-instantaneous available on being switched-on.

I wonder if the choice of ‘budget’ M.2 NVMe SSD advocated by Roon is the cause of the slow start-up times experienced by some ROCK owners.

That doesn't sound right. If you have a mega-library it can extend the database load but 10mins is too long. I run ~20k albums on an i5 NUC which is a few years old now. 2-3mins max for full library load. ROCK GUI page is back within 10s.

Worth thinking about what hardware you have installed and whether it is working ok.

Might be anti-virus interference.

Interesting; thanks both. I'll do a bit of digging & report back in due course.

Well I (with the help of a friend who knows his way around these things) think I've got to the bottom of this. I initially powered down my NUC the re-booted it to see if it did indeed take 10 minutes to come online. It didn't, but it wasn't far short of it with times of 8.31, 8.28 & 8.31. My friend has a similar sized library of c 31k albums & his start-up times were less than half of mine.

Further digging revealed that although the library is stored on 3 HDs, ROCK somehow had 2 versions of HD 2 with a very similar but not quite identical name. Other than the slow start-up it all performs as it should but that ghost HD must be where the problems lie. I'm going to remove HD 2 & send it off for an MOT.

+1

While I'm happy with my home-build fanless NUC/ROCK, I bought and build prior to the Mac M-series Minis. These are cheaper, more powerful, and if they're anything like my M1 MBP, the fans won't kick in at all unless you're doing something pretty demanding. Plus you can also use for other things like media playback, etc., if wanted.

If you did want to do something more demanding like Room Correction or upsampling in Roon, M2 would have the power to handle this also, but the fans might kick in depending on how much you're doing. The answer to that is just to stick it in another room where the noise won't disturb.