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Replacing Roon - What Should I get?

I'm tired of Roon having brain farts.  I have an original Roon Nucleus and have updated and augmented the Memory.  This helped for a bit.  But now, I keep having to reboot the darn thing.

It's not my network.  I have checked it out and everything in the house works fine.

Here is the setup.  A direct fiber optic link goes to the Router.  Then ethernet to Roon from the Router.  This way I get Roon to talk with the setup upstairs.  I have an 35 foot ethernet cable that runs through the walls directly from the router into my dCS Lina.

I want to replace the Roon.  I am thinking about an Innuos Stream.  Just need a streamer that can hold Roon/Tidal.  Don't need a DAC as the dCS does that quite well.  I have a SSD in the Nucleus that holds a ton of my music that I want to move over.

Thoughts on what to replace the Roon with?  Innuos (Stream) always get bandied about.  I hear about Arender as well. I don't want to get an updated Roon.

I also wonder about deleting and reinstalling the Roon App on my iPads.

Thanks in Advance

pgaulke60
emergingsoul
1,536 posts
 

Pursue the roon community for answers and upgrade the nucleus and make sure you have a back up.

roon has excellent commentary that’s hard to live without

I think the file manager system is horrifying on roon, it should be a lot better.

loganfan
33 posts
 

Hello,

 Sorry to hear about your trouble. I have had Roon for about 3 years.

luckily for me, I have never had a problem. I am using a Rockna Wavelight Server, this has a Roon Core built in. Maybe thats why I have been lucky?

Andy

audphile1's avatar
audphile1
7,943 posts
 

@jji666 agreed. 
Roon forum is as useless as an ejection seat on a helicopter. I think there’s a good percentage of posters there who actually don’t have roon and or don’t own systems that can put roon to the test. The ASR minions with their “it’s all 1s and 0s” and “we need a blind test” mindset spread their tentacles there and flooded the forums with nonsense. 
I’ve not seen a single helpful response there other than basic solutions to extremely basic problems in cases where people simply don’t understand how to even use roon. Other than that, good luck 

On a positive note - I hard rebooted my Nucleus One last night and some of the issues are gone for now. Still a but slow to react and execute, and still sonically inferior to jplay (to my ears) but it’s working now. 

sufentanil's avatar
sufentanil
786 posts
 

I can appreciate the challenges the OP faces having to reboot the system frequently.  It's reassuring to know, though, that there are configurations where Roon works well.

I was also one of those with an early lifetime membership.  Computers are a hobby of mine, and I enjoy administering all kinds of systems in my home IT closet.  Roon core runs happily on my 14-year-old Linux server.  I stream it to various locations with Intel NUC's running Rock, but mostly to my main 2-channel system with a PS Audio Airlens as the streaming endpoint.  It's all controlled from either a Mac laptop or iPad.

My setup works great, but of course it requires a lot of computer experience.  I think for a much simpler system, someone could use either a Mac Mini or a small inexpensive computer running Windows as their Roon core.  I can definitely recommend the Airlens as a good endpoint; I stream DSD256 and 24/352 data with no issues.

Roon isn't perfect.  I wish the search mechanism were a little more consistent in its results, for instance.  But it does some things brilliantly, and is available in so many different platforms. 

I'm not familiar with the Roon nucleus, so I really can't speak to that.  There are ways, though, of making it work with basic computer hardware, and you can choose a platform that you're most comfortable with.  It might be worth investing a little time to explore this option.

Michael

artg
383 posts
 

rsf507, learn more here: https://jplay.app/faq

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