Replacing Roon - What Should I get?

Is the dCS Lina in your main system and you have something else upstairs? Do you want access to the same SSD of music files both upstairs and downstairs? If yes, then you need that library on the network. Just checking online, this looks totally doable with Innuos.

Do NOT assume though that you can pop the SSD out of the ROCK and use it elsewhere. Get a second SSD… maybe a portable USB one like from Samsung… and download all the tunes from the ROCK over the network.

You could then test just using the dCS app with the USB SSD attached to the Lina to see if that works for you… just with the dCS. If you are OK just to have streaming upstairs, then this might do.

If you run Roon rock on anything, the OS doesn’t give you the thousands of commands in Linux that you would normally use to debug/troubleshoot the system. Roon took all of these commands out to save space and cycles. If you have a problem you are guessing on what it is and you resort to reboots.

I have ran Roon for many years on real OS’s like Mac OSX and Linux with no problems. I suggest running Roon on a real computer (Mac or Linux) and see if you have the same issues. 
 

You might have outgrown your hardware with your music files. I have around 200k of music tracks and have Roon upsample everything to DSD256 (which takes more processing power from the computer) and never misses a beat. 
 

Roon sounded the best in native mode (no upsampling) running on Linux with 6 cores and 64G of memory but running Qobuz Connect directly to the streamer sounded better but the interface isn’t that good and no access to my local ripped music. Since my dac can handle dsd256 input thru i2s, I went back to running Roon on a M1 Mac and turned on upsampling to dsd256. This sounds better than QC directly. 

Raspberry Pi 5 running Volumio, all music files on a 4TB SSD drive attached to my network router, native Qobuz and Tidal integration as well as Qobuz connect.  Done.

I have never been a Roon user.  I have seen it used.  It appears to help organize large collections and also suggest new music based on listening algorithms.  It also provides liner notes type information on the recordings.
   That was exciting stuff but as with all digital technology it is only a few years before the competition emulates it.  Particularly if one is using a streaming service, the service software has similar functionality.  Roon may still have a niche organizing and integrating a hard drive with music along with the music pulled from the streaming service, so it all resides in one place.  Personally I’m ok with having those files in 2 areas, but I understand the appeal.

  I can’t address the SQ issue from experience but I have seen enough written about potential SQ degradation with Roon that it discouraged me from ever becoming a user.

I was having occasional hiccups while using Roon with my desktop acting as the core so I went with the sonic transporter also mentioned previously. It has been very stable. It’s about half the price of the newer Roon nucleus. FWIW I have it hooked up by Ethernet to a dcs  rossini