Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Thread Like Summary - 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

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.