Streamer/server that works as a Roon core

Beauty of Meitner’s in-built streaming card, besides the great sound, is its compatibility with Tidal Connect, Qobuz Connect, Jplay and Mconnect. It gives you options outside of Roon. It would be cool if it had airplay but you can’t have everything I guess. 

5+ years on my Roon Nucleus, highly recommend. Works great over HDMI and network out with several dacs over the years. Simple purpose built device with a library I can easily manage over the network from any computer. 

I had been using a Small Green Computer i5 Gen 3 server as my Roon Core with my MA3i as streamer and DAC.  The sound was absolutely wonderful.  But I recently replaced the i5 with a Baetis Audio Prodigy X3 which now serves as my Roon Core and streamer, using its USB output (which is the upgraded SOtM module) to the MA3i.  Wow!  Smooth as butter with improved resolution, bass extension, dynamics and image focus. In addition to the improved sound quality the personalized service from Baetis is second to none. My unit was purchased used and was treated like a customer who purchased it new from Baetis. Joe Makkerh spent about 5 hours setting everything up for me remotely.  This level of customer service is unparalleled. I recently added the upgraded HD Plex power supply but have not been able to listen to my system because my amp is down and being repaired. I can't wait to hear the difference that makes with the Analysis Plus power cable.

My Aires G2.1 does Tidal C. Qobuz C and Airplay. 

I've been considering a new scheme for local .flac and .dsf files that moves the internal SSD library to my NAS. Currently, my streamer is a server for local files and streamer for Tidal and Qobuz. 

Based on this conversation, I'm not clear whether folks prefer offloading the local library to a network attached device to running a captive disk on the streamer/server. I"m not sure whether this makes a difference but changing out SSDs would be easier. 

@tee_dee 

I have that setup with a QNAP RAID NAS, linked by fiber ethernet to a custom Pareto Audio server with 16TB of M.2 storage.  It's possible to make comparisons with either unit serving as Roon host playing the music library on either unit.  Unsurprisingly, the best sound is with Roon and the music library both on the Pareto server.  But it's not too far off of that performance with Pareto as Roon host playing the library on QNAP.