Best Server To Run Roon Core

So to make a little bit longer story shorter, I didn’t think I was getting $5000 worth of performance from my Innuos ZENith Mk3 2TB for Roon core. Plus I only stream and I don’t rip CDs. So I sold my Zenith and embarked on a journey to find where the sweet spot is for the same performance at a lower price. I think I may have found it with an Azulle Kaby Lake i5 Inspire Mini PC with 32 (16 x 2) GB RAM and a Samsung 250 GB M.2 SSD that I installed. The total cost of all of this was less than $614.00 inclusive of sales tax. The Mini PC is fanless as opposed to the NUC and obviates the need for an Akasa $169 Turing FX case. I already have a couple of Sonore UltraRendus. So my streamers are separate from my Core. So far, my SQ from my listening sessions is at least no worse than the ZENith. If interested here are the instructions on how to install ROCK on the Azulle Inspire Mini PC:

https://tr.cloudmagic.com/h/v6/link-track/1.0/1614639065722801-da92ff06-d7c2-b7c6-e435-c956aa1cdc11/1614639049/8f204384f210400d4f96e56413cb904b/ada5e8053ef19e4a287be3a01b3f4347/173161b1a613fac0e4b7eff6af1fa494?redirect_uri=https://community.roonlabs.com/t/azulle-inspire-mini-pc-instructions-for-installing-rock/148202

I hope this assists our community. Regards, RJ

Lucas Audio LMDS - A computer genius!!!!

Well, like all things audio, this escalated quickly. I'm no expert on all things audio or PC and while the Taiko is certainly a beautiful piece of engineering, despite using an off-the-shelf workstation/server motherboard, and no mention of any special consideration given to the network or USB interface. I wasn't aware of any bottleneck presented by SATA based SSDs(certainly not by any HiRes music files), other than file transfers I've seen very little real world improvement using a PCIe M.2 drive, even when I was using it for the OS(which this doesn't) Is there truly any audible difference between SATA and PCIe based solid state storage? I guess the price difference isn't too great and it is a space saver, but they do get extremely hot. Finally, can anyone explain why the Taiko needs such a large bank of capacitors? It's not as though transients draw a bunch of power when expressed digitally, I would think the Taiko server would have a fairly consistent power draw when in use that would never require such a large capacitor bank, unless it is acting as some sort of UPS. Looks nice though.

For the best I guess the Wadax Reference Server could give the Taiko some competition. Their dac was the best the TAS reviewer had heard.

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/wadax-reference-server.31859/

Spotify seems to move into hq streaming, this may change the market somewhat.

Whatever you buy, make sure it is software upgradable and from a somewhat stable company. A NUC and an external re-clocker might be a good start that can be switched later.