I had to look up Mock!

I was a bit worried about how it would perform, but *touch wood* it's been brilliant for nearly a year now. Glad I didn't fork out for a Nucleus @ £1500.
Did it for under £20 😂

Well I said I'd do it one day and that day is today.

What tipped me over the edge is the release of Roon 1.8 which has addressed all the little (OCD) issues I had with Roon. Seems I wasn't the only one, as they have listened to the community and this update for me now ticks all those unchecked boxes.

I've purchased an Intel NUC i5 which is probably overkill, as Roon recommend an i3 for small to medium libraries up to around 10K albums, a few zones and minor DSP. An i7 is recommended for 12K plus albums, multiple zones and a lot of DSP. I'm never likely to get anywhere near that, so thought an i5 was a good middle ground option and should run slightly cooler than an i7, not that my use of Roon is going to tax it that much. It was also £200 cheaper than an i7, which helped pay for the fanless case and half decent SSD/RAM to run the ROCK operating system.

The case is just a big lump of aluminium much like Roons Nucleus, allowing the system to run fanless as it's just a heatsink. All you do is take the NUC board out of its case, slap some thermal paste over the CPU and screw it into the Akasa case - 4 screws for the board and 8 screws on the Turing case for the side panels. It's really easy to do.



Akasa Turing - fanless NUC enclosure 

You can position it longways too and they provide two decorative endplates for this, but upright should be better for cooling.

So the NUC is in bits at the moment and I'm about to download the Roon ROCK software. Then you need to update the NUC BIOS and install Roon, after that I should be good to go. Pretty straightforward as computer builds go.

I have previously tried Roon a couple of times on a Windows 10 PC, but was never really happy running it that way and I know from previous experience of building music servers, it's never going to be the best option sound quality wise, unless you hack the bejeezus out of the O/S, which I have also done in the past, but can't be arsed with that anymore either . . . and as some will know, Microsoft and their forced updates really tick me off, as they often undo all your work!

I'm not expecting the sound quality to be any better or worse than Volumio, as essentially they are both the same thing, very small Linux systems designed to exclusively play digital media and nothing else. I really like Volumio, but I want a bit more from my music playback, so I'm happy to pay Roon Labs for that privilege.

I'll let you know if that doesn't happen.

What did I spend? Well a lot less than an Roon Nucleus and it still leaves me change to buy a good PSU like a Teddy Pardo - a lot of change actually.

NUC8i5BEH - £270
Akasa Turing Case - £100
Crucial 250GB M.2 NVMe SSD - £39
Crucial 8GB DDR4 RAM - £37
The Roon ROCK software is free, but obviously you need a Rood subscription to use it.

Hats off to Roon Labs too, not only do they provide the ROCK software free, but they also have very comprehensive guides on how to build what is effectively a Nucleus clone, right down to selection of hardware and what hardware is actually supported. I know you still need a subscription, but nonetheless I still think that's pretty good customer focus.

Oh and in case anyone isn't familiar with a NUC, it's a very small form factor PC, no bigger than a stack of half a dozen CD cases. You could use it 'as is' for a Roon ROCK, but it has a fan inside which from previous experience can be detrimental to playback quality and potentially noisy if you're near it.

Intel NUC



And finally, this is what tipped me over the edge;



Enjoy the music and keep safe

I like the effort they are putting in for you to discover music so much easier than scrolling through magazines and then looking in those record shops where you could pick up the obscure in the hope you come across a hidden gem

Bad feedback is good marketing - if you know what to do about it !

Currently on a NAS, but as my 4,400 album FLAC library is only 1.35TB, I plan to put a 2TB SSD in the Turing case as there's room and fittings for one 2.5" drive above the board. I can't see my FLAC library growing that much from now with Tidal, but if it does I'll just prune out the stuff I don't play anymore and keep them on the NAS. For sure an internal SSD will be the best solution -  the 250GB M.2 drive cannot be used for anything other than the O/S.

Roon is $119 a year or $699 for a lifetime subscription. When I first considered Roon a lifetime subscription was $499, but at that time it was new, unproven and with no indication it would be so widely adopted or successful. I was tempted to take the plunge, but I think it was the right decision at the time - it could have flopped. I'm going to pay for a year up front (you can pay monthly but it's $12.99 a month) and then if I'm still happy in a years time I'll get a lifetime licence.

I'll just have a Tidal Hi-Fi account, that will do me and I'm on a family account so it's only £9.99 a month as there's 3 of us, instead of £19.99 a month. So the same as Spotify Premium

I guess as a user of classical Spotify streaming I'm not the target audience for this?

It lives!




I have to say it was an absolute doddle to set-up, the Rock software installed in seconds, about 10 to 15 so it's extremely lightweight, mind you installing to an NVMe SSD is fast anyway -  updating the NUC BIOS took a lot longer. Once I had Roon installed on my desktop PC, the ROCK was immediately recognised and selected as the playback device. That was it, only thing to do after that was index my FLAC library on the NAS.

The case is not even warm to the touch so it's doing its job well, but running an i5 and just playing music isn't going to push it much over idle temps anyway. The LED isn't anywhere near as bright as the picture looks, that's my phone camera over exposing, it's actually a small blue dot. I have some new music on the USB drive sticking out the front, but that won't stay there to spoil the looks. I think it's a very good case, affordable, good looking, well engineered and more than capable of cooling a NUC, certainly an i5 at any rate.

As for sound quality, well it is a step up from Volumio, but that was running on a netbook with all the extra gubbings that entails, screen, fan etc. It is already the best sounding music server I have built and also the easiest, much simpler to setup than Volumio and that's not exactly hard, but I'd expect it to be as it's not free! So all I need to do next is copy my music library to an internal 2TB SSD and I'm done. The power supply can wait for now.

I'm really liking Roon 1.8 too - so I'm a happy chappie

Indeed it can old bean - that had crossed my mind, as has an SOtM sMS 200.

But for now this will do me, once I move to Suffolk and get a permanent home then I'll need an 'end game' system, which might just be speakers but we shall see. Depends how much money is left in the kitty

I really fancy the Tannoy Arden (Legacy ones), but I'm not thinking about that yet, depends on the room.