Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Thread Like Summary - How to incorporate Roon

Hi All,

I was hoping to get some advice from you experts!! I'm about to set up a second system and am pretty excited about it!! It will be just a simple two channel set up for music only. (Purchasing the Iron Man 3 speakers from Bruce, who has been amazing with the whole transaction, amazing communication and service!!)

So. I really want to get Roon. It's purely for the interface as the Sooloos interface is awful IMO.

I shall be running the following equipment:
- 218
- MC200
- DSP7200.2

My question is; is there a way to integrate Roon with this equipment OR do I have to buy a Roon core unit like a Nucleus? I'm not sure if there is a way to connect a Roon account to interface with the MC200 so that could become the Roon core?

Forgive the dumb questions... Just a rookie trying to get the best set up and running.

Also. I just realized that with the above I wouldn't get room correction... I'm a bit worried about being able to sort out any room issues with the 7200s... Am I overthinking this? Would the only way to control this to add a G68 for example? I have one one in the theater room and would really prefer to keep the system in my living room as simple and box free as possible...

Any advice you could give would be amazing!

This post is long, so feel free to click "Next." But if you're not a diehard Meridian Aficionado who can rationalise any expenditure for the illusive perfect sound, this might be an entertaining jaunt on some of the whys and wherefores of analogue to digital and Sooloos to Roon.

HOW IT ALL STARTED

I bought my first Meridian rig in early early 90s while living in Hong Kong. I was graduating from Quad 44/33/405-2. My first Meridian iteration was: 501/556/506/504, with A500 speakers. After a move to Singapore in late 1995 I went “Balanced": 502/557/508/504 (and later a 588) with a pair of Merlin Excalibur towers. That lot came to the US with me in 2003 and served me well when accompanied by a PS Audio P600 Power Plant customized to also transform 230v to 120v.
Then, in 2013 I auditioned Sooloos at my M dealer; a 10 minute walk from my apartment. I made the fateful decision to go digital. My digital experience to that point had been limited to iPod and iTunes.

After first installing Sooloos on an all digital rig (C16/MD600/DSP7200/iPad/iPhone ), I found a lot that was quirky in the Sooloos GUI, but to choose and play music was easy, with a very shallow learning curve. Creating playlists was not logical to me but I persevered. I later added an 818v1 and upgraded the 7200s to 7200.2, and the sound improved dramatically. It continued to improve as the 818 became a v2 and v3 and all firmware was kept up to spec. I also had an HD621 installed at some point, and later traded up to a UHD722. Not a conversation for now but getting the config file right on that hateful bugger was the most frustrating experience of my 30 years of Meridian ownership.

A few years ago I also purchased a QNAP TS-453A - from my Meridian distributor - as a replacement for my MD600 so I could have Sooloos AND regular NAS utility from a single appliance.

One of the unexpected things I found to be very handy in Sooloos was the ability to export my library to AAC (and FLAC) and have it constantly update without intervention, rather than doing item-by-item adds-ins as my library expanded, using dBpoweramp. I used the AAC masterfile for my car, and then to put it on my Surface Pro on a 512GB EVO Plus microSD Card; a solution that gave me a decent representation of my library while traveling, yet without occupying my C drive. Alas, that was not a good enough reason to put up with the increasing quirkiness of Sooloos and the loss of support for third-party metadata. The dysfunctional metadata started driving me bonkers, especially since M's support for Sooloos was discontinued.


TRANSITION TO ROON - STEP ONE

I transitioned to Roon in stages. I’d initially fought it as a diehard Meridian loyalist. First, I put Roon Core on my Intel NUC i7 Win10/64 PC (used as a media PC) that is attached to my 818 and Sony HDTV. It gave me one zone. My initial reaction to the UI was pleasing, but it started annoying me for one primary reason. It doesn't return to my library after choosing music. But it was a matter of disciplining myself to take multiple mouse clicks “back” to get "home" to the Library View, or using the miniscule pulldown in the top left of the screen. Why can’t there be a single "home" button that takes you back to your preferred default Library View (“Albums” in my case)? Must bitch to Roon about that.

An inevitable first step was to delete Sooloos core from my QNAP to force me to tackle Roon's learning curve (yeah, yeah, yeah, not nearly as steep as appeared at first blush). The bottom line here is that one of Roon's great strengths is the dizzyingly flexible GUI. Its primary barrier to novice acceptance is the dizzyingly flexible GUI.


THE "SOFT" CHALLENGE TO TRANSITIONING

I sympathize with users who found themselves having to justify the transition from Sooloos to Roon to the person with whom they share their life. These mere mortals can't fathom what was wrong with Sooloos, and have little patience to learn the Roon GUI's quirks, especially when no improvement in sound quality accompanies the migration; you can't say "but darling, doesn't it sound so much better?" Well you can, and it wouldn't be the first pork pie you've told about audio equipment. But life partners can be trained, if given the right incentives (or fanciful explanations).


SYSTEM TOPOLOGY

Why didn't I put Roon Core on my QNAP TS-453A? Because the TS-453A doesn't have an SSD drive to accelerate the Roon database. Confusing to many novices: the Roon database is NOT the the Roon music store (which I had as a FLAC Music Master File residing on the QNAP). The Roon OS/database benefits enormously from a dedicated and fast drive. So I was on a trajectory to "invest" (the most abused word in audio) in a dedicated Roon Server. But what hardware?


THE EVENTUAL HARDWARE CHOICE

The latest stage of my Roon journey - a coronavirus lockdown project - was to install a dedicated Roon server. I opted for the Roon Nucleus Plus, into which I’ve installed a 4TB SSD to accommodate the current iteration of my FLAC Music Master File.

The Nucleus Plus is ostensibly an Intel NUC with i7 CPU and a custom and lean Linux OS (installed on a 128GB SSD). The "basic" Nucleus would be more than enough (based as it is on an Intel NUC with i3 processor and a 64GB SSD), but I find my library expanding a fair clip lately. And yes, OK, it's not the fiscally wise route, but it appealed to the tinkerer in me.

The dedicated Roon Nucleus server boots and processes commands blindingly fast, and in the absence of any moving parts means its genuinely noiseless; a bat could put its ear to it and hear nothing.


WHY A NUCLEUS AND NOT A (cheaper) NUC i5 or i7 ROCK?

I’d thought long and hard about paying extra for the Nucleus over buying an Intel i7 NUC as a dedicated Roon Server. I have a lot of experience with NUCs; I currently have one as a “media PC” attached to my 818 and HDTV, and one of the newer ones in my home office for Adobe Lightroom and all things MS Office 365. I focused mostly on one issue. A NUC with the specs you will want is not fanless; very quiet, but not fanless. That means they draw dust; and they’re very fiddly little buggers to clean. And you’ll know it needs cleaning when the CPU starts throttling.

Roon Nucleus - both models - are 100% fanless, and the aluminum case is one big heat sink for the CPU. That was my line in the sand. It’s not strictly necessary, but it was my choice after having to clean my media PC’s fan twice in two years. The Nucleus has nothing to clean. Once installed, you have no reason to touch it, or see it, until you move house.

I suspect also that Roon’s decision to produce the Nucleus could be colored by the absurdly simple setup. That alone ought to reduce customer service queries.

As for the cost, if you’ve forked out for a pair of Meridian DSPs, and an 818, the Nucleus doesn’t seem such a heavy lift in return for a maintenance-free appliance that loads it’s own firmware updates. With the Nucleus, every phone, tablet, computer, and audio device attached to your network can be an endpoint, all running independent zones, running independent playlists or radio stations. I think that’s pretty cool. And in 2020 dollars (or pounds or shekels), it’s MUCH cheaper than every item of legacy Meridian equipment I’ve retired and sold for a fraction of what I purchased it for (MD600, Control:15, ...). To me, it wasn’t even rationalizing. It made a lot of sense – to me.

If you’re running Roon Server on a retired Macbook, either Nucleus is a big step. The aficionados shouldn’t make light of that pain point.


TINKERERS CORNER (regular humans should skip this part)

When I opened the case to install the 4TB SSD I took a look around. Revision B of the Nucleus is a very sensibly laid out inside and all key parts are easily accessible. It's a lot better than the Revision A model from what I've seen of photos of the interior. Anyway, I decided to tinker.

The OEM 128GB SSD is a Transcend 128GB NVME PCIe model TS128GMTE110S. This means much faster read / write speeds than a regular M.2 PCI card. In the ballpark of 3 X faster. But I had a spare Samsung.
Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD 250GB - M.2 NVME left over from upgrading another NUC (I use this spec for the C drive in all my PCs). These run about 6X faster and well… I had one. So I cloned the original SSD on to the Samsung 250 using AOMEI Partition Manager and put that in the Nucleus. I also put a heat sink on it as they run pretty warm when they’re working hard. I taped the OEM SSD to the inside of the lid of the case so I’ll always know where it is if I need it.

Then... I also found I had spare RAM DIMMS that were compatible with the single 8GB module installed on the motherboard; a pair of 16GB DIMMS from when I upgraded my main NUC to 64GB. Well, I could have left them in my parts parts bin, but knowing this motherboard is spec’d up to 32GB RAM, and they were there looking up at me saying "take us," I thought “why not? 32GB of RAM won't do a damn thing, but it can't hurt.”

Then I installed the Samsung SSD 860 EVO 4TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD to be my internal storage. I put the lid back on and all was done. By this time the men in the white coats had arrived to take me away!

I was gripped by a pall of melancholy once the job was finished. I was mildly irritated that my coronavirus lockdown project was done and dusted in under an hour, notwithstanding my unnecessary embellishments.

The complete install had been a doddle. It’s now at the bottom of a cabinet away from the “new gear” police (Her), and who knows when I’ll see it again. Booting the Nucleus from power down takes no time at all. It was ready by the time I stood up after pressing the power-on button. From opening the control app in any of my devices to having ready access to my library takes to the count of four or five. If you want to have the Nucleus on a shelf, desk, or countertop, do so; it looks great.

Please forgive my ramble, and happy lockdown.

Thanks for sharing the story. You make a really interesting point about the perceived cost of Roon vs the entry costs of Sooloos and the subsequent depreciation costs. I have a similar upgrade history over the last 30 years and have mastered the art of actually erasing the memory of any previous monies spent 😎

Your informative post gives justification to my recent decision to "invest" in a Roon Nucleus Plus Rev B. The migration from Sooloos to Roon with invaluable help from the greats, Ratbert, VK and Altus was achieved without any major problems.

I installed a 4TB SSD in the Nucleus and now benefit from the absence of mechanical drive noise in my small listening room from the previous 2 x MD600 + C15 set up. This was probably the last upgrade I will ever need for streaming.

You have clearly described the reasons for my decisions that at the time I knew were intuitively right but did not put collectively into words.

Much appreciated post

Best Hector