[1KW]

Originally Posted by Puma Cat

Ah, that's because it has a high-bandwidth CPU spewing lots of garbage-y noise, including EMI and RF, all over the place. Its the high-bandwidth noise that's the worst. For example, this high-bandwidth noise can be picked up by the speaker wires, acting literally as antennas, and be fed backwards into the power amp, to be amplified again as noise. John Atkinson wrote a good article about this some years ago. This is why its good to put any computers as far away from the audio rack as possible.

As far as horsepower, Roon really doesn't need a lot because its not really doing much that is actually CPU intensive. Its not like editing 4K 60P 4:2:2 video or anything close to that with respect to demanding a lot from a processor. Its just pulling a set of audio files from a drive, sending them to a streamer or network bridge, and loading metadata for viewing on a remote app. I can see having a i7 for upsampling DSD but, really, not many folks are doing that in the grand scheme of things. Redbook 16/44 is by far the largest proportion of content, probably 99.5% of all the content that is played on Roon, particularly when used with Tidal. YMMV, of course.

My DirectStream DAC does the DSD upsampling so I didn’t see the point of having the Mac mini being set to upsample and run everything native .