750$ Intel NUC vs $6000 Aurender N200: I don't hear the difference

On some other comments, i know ROON makes a big deal about plenty of CPU etc. But it comes down to two questions:  1) do you employ DSP? and 2) do you simultaneously stream and synch multiple stream? If no, it runs on about anything (e.g.: i ran it for a while on a 2009 macbook pro laptop with  Core 2 Duo chip and also running plenty of other apps - ancient!).

Now that i employ a little DSP and sometimes synch 3 zones, i need more power. I have a quad core i5 NUC, a bunch of RAM (32? 16? forget) and two SSDs - one for Roon and one for music. Truth is that 99% of my listening is Tidal.

@essrand 

Thank you for your work and your post. I'm currently using Audirvana and found the same when I did a trial of Roon. However, I have not investigated ROCK and this looks like the direction to go for me in 2022.  Having over 9TB stored on an SSD drive now makes it worth putting together.  Cheers.

Use your ears...

Want better or different sound? Spend the extra money on better speakers, room treatments, make sure you have plenty of power, or play with your DAC / Pre-amp, get a subwoofer etc.

Computer has one job. Deliver bit perfect data. If you use a little DSP with Roon (as I do), make sure your computer/server/whatever you decide to call it... has enough processing power so it doesn’t bog down. Maybe spring for a solid state drive.

Love Roon however, I went in with other audio nerds early on for the lifetime subscription on a group/gift offer Roon had going. Saved some cash there.

My server uses Linux, and fortunately the mfg (Salk) provides incredible support and made sure the latest update would work as it was a bit more of a change.

It also won’t shock me someday if like most computers that I will need something new to continue to run Roon. This isn’t because of owning a particular brand, but after years of buying nice Apple (or insert brand) computers, they all seem to "outdate". (that is an entire other subject).  I hope this isn't the case, but it won't shock me.

But, feel free to drop $7500 or more on a dedicated audio computer if you like, it’s not my money! (but I would spend it elsewhere in the system...)

Sorry, but your test is not under identical conditions.

Two nights ago I did an extensive test between Quboz and Tidal MQA on a decent live recording in 44khz/16 bit (Phish at the Berkeley Greek Theater in 2010), interleaving the songs on my Aurender N100H playlist.

The Quboz versions had substantially better dynamics and punch than the Tidal MQA versions, which sounded smoothed over and dull. This has been consistent with other tests that I have made of same resolution recordings available on both Quboz and Tidal. My conclusion is that you can hear the lossiness of MQA, and you are doing just that in your own test.

If your DAC is competent then the result is as expected just as expected as the pages of posts trying to explain away what is the simple conclusion.

I question the Nagra implementation and conclusions on the analog side wrt it being the purest implementation as evidenced by the distortion spec, but it is more than low enough not to be a concern. Digitally the architecture seems sound so why would there be a difference? If there was a difference that means the DAC is inherently flawed. Why do so many people want to jump to the conclusion that your DAC is inherently flawed I have no idea.

@yyzsantabarbara I used to have a couple of MicroRendu. They are electrically noisy. I got rid of them because it just didn't seem worth the effort and I ended up changing the architecture of my system anyway. I saw ASR did some tests later that they are sensitive to the power supply. I would have ended up getting rid of them anyways because the firmware did not support any form of time synchronization between multiple units which I needed. However I was disappointed because I was really hoping they would have worked out.