I Love Roon But... No Wallwart Thank You Very Much

[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by 2fastdriving

I do the same thing with my NUC even though it has a fan: put in the audio rack, use USB. I don't see any issue. But I can tell you that many people believe USB is the worst thing ever devised and that you should use network bridges only.

I tried the basic MicroRendu once, but couldn't hear any difference from my USB. Perhaps the higher-end versions are better but I don't know.

Well, Marc, you've got a pretty amazing setup with your Esoteric gear, so I can see how the microRendu may not have been any better.

What I can say is that a microRendu going via USB to a DAC is significantly superior-sounding than going directly from a Mac Mini in the audio rack to a USB DAC.

[IM3CPO]

Originally Posted by 2fastdriving

My only "mistake" is that I did get the i7 with the fan case. It's a little bit noisy, but honestly the fans on my GS150 are louder anyway. I can't hear either from my seating position.

For someone new to this, i'd suggest the i5 and a fanless case if you can find one.

You can undervolt the CPU and get SUBSTANTIALLY lower CPU temps without lowering any performance of the system. I have a few i7 NUC's and my fans never turn on; even under high load conditions.

Its a bit of a process to do this as every CPU is different and will behave differently to undervolting so there is no tried and true value that works for everyone. If there is enough interest in how to do this, I may be able to be persuaded to do a youtube video on how to do it.

[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by IM3CPO

You can undervolt the CPU and get SUBSTANTIALLY lower CPU temps without lowering any performance of the system.

"We have a Main Bus B undervolt"....crew of Apollo 13.

[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 .

[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by 1KW

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 .

Ah, good point.

[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by 1KW

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 .

Ah, good point.

[1KW]

I installed 16 gig of ram into my Mac mini , ran all the software updates then went into roon settings and maxed out the memory ram setting for artwork which went from 64mb to 2 gig., things are more snappy now.

[Higgens]

Good news!

[80B]

David, that's good to hear. FWIW, I upgraded my Mac Mini from a 2010 model when the current generation came out last November - waited for what seemed forever for Apple to update it to the current generation. As I use the MacMini for more than just the Roon core, there have been multiple benefits to going from such an old MM.

[1KW]

Originally Posted by 80B

David, that's good to hear. FWIW, I upgraded my Mac Mini from a 2010 model when the current generation came out last November - waited for what seemed forever for Apple to update it to the current generation. As I use the MacMini for more than just the Roon core, there have been multiple benefits to going from such an old MM.

My Mac mini is just being used for roon. It’s performance is nearly instantaneous. Yes I’m sure a 6 core computer is going to be much faster than dual core although when I installed roon the activity monitor only showed 25 % of the processor being used as it scanned my music library. I noticed even though my macmini is dual core I set the roon setting for 4 cores because my computer does hyperlinkIng, creating a additional 2 virtual cores with the extra memory. For $50 I may continue the experiment by installing a 500 gig SSD to replace the mechanical HD. I also have a back up of my music library on a external 2 TB SSD. After I do all this I will probably end up with a different music server LOL. Like I said it’s a experiment to see how much I can improve this Mac mini.