Uberwaltz,
I recently made the jump from Aurender to Roon. I did so because I wanted whole house, music zones (Sonos system) and because I don’t like the way music backup can be done from Aurender. I have 2 TB of music on my 4 TB Aurender. My pre/pro is a Classe Sigma SSP.
A few points:
1. I just checked and it appears I can still access my NAS from my Aurender even with the new update so don’t understand why you are having issues. The Conductor App is not Roon but it works reasonably well if you are just playing music locally.
2. Accessing a NAS from Aurender is not a strong point of this platform and I wouldn’t generally recommend it. Previously, you were planning on installing an internal hard drive. Did you do this? It shouldn’t matter too much which HD because the Aurender reads the file from the HD to a second internal SSD to play from and this is where Aurender shines quite well for the money... but it does strongly benefit from: PC upgrade, isolation feet and a very high quality USB cable.
3. If you are still planning on going with the Roon, I have not had good success running it from my dedicated iMac, but I love running it from a Nucleus (plus in my case). With following qualifier... if you are running USB out, you should significantly upgrade power supply (I’m using a Keces) and Ethernet cables need to be top notch. USB cable is critical and isolation feet need to be under both Nucleus and power supply. My bill for this upgrade ended up costing over $5K so a huge price investment when possibly a $350 internal drive might solve your problems. I had expected it to run around $3K so was pretty disappointed once I discovered how many ancillary products were necessary for great sound. I don’t know if the big power supply is necessary if you are using a different Roon endpoint via Ethernet. I don’t have a way of testing this.
Were I to fully understand the true costs of going from Aurender to Roon with good sound quality... I probably would have waited or may have gone a different direction like Innuos although now that I have it fully optimized, it does sound at least as good as the Aurender and I can play my music all over the house...
I hope this is helpful info for you.
