Upgrade to 200->400 or add Aurender N100H?

[BrianT]

Although AIR3 was working for me with VOX on Mac-book pro, I'm facing difficulties with it with Roon. It drops the connection after couple of songs and its not a pleasant experience after that.

Trying to get Roonbridge to work with Raspi 2.0 but running into issues. Will order 3.0 kit tomorrow.

Super excited about D400..

Sam

I'm running a D400, Air 3, Mac Mini & Roon (roonserver) and have had NO DROPOUTS since Air3 was released
I can use USB or ETH from the Mac Mini (I prefer ETH)  Devialet 10.2 software.

I hope you find what is causing your problem as I know Roon & Air 3 work perfect.

Good choice on going for the companion.

Brian

I didn't have much luck with an old Mac Mini (original series), which kept dropping its network connection. My long-term reliable streaming solution (now running over 10 years!) is a pair of HP Microservers, each equipped with a bunch of high performance high capacity drives. The HP micro server can be bought on eBay for as little as $100 -- it's a little shoebox design, with no OS and (sometimes) a CD drive, but often without that. You plug in drives on a set of four caddies, so you can do as little as 1 TB to 24 TB (depending on the drives you use). I run Linux Vortexbox, by far the best OS for music streaming (everything irrelevant to music playing is stripped out). This runs the Squeezebox Server by default, and will rip CDs, DVDs, and Blu Rays (with a Blu Ray drive) automatically indexing it etc. I keep two micro servers, one in the basement and one in the attic. I can access the music on them through my iPad, iPhone, computers, and a trio of Logitech Squeezeboxes. This set up has been the most stable and reliable in my experience, runs 24/7 365 days a year for about 7-10 years now. Nothing else I've tried comes close. 

I wasted money on two Sony HAP-Z music players. Hardware is quite good (30 pound brick like player), but software was written by incompetent fools who don't know how to handle music files efficiently. The Squeezebox Server can rip through 4 Terabytes of music in 1 hour. The Sony, by contrast, will take 2-3 weeks to index the same amount of music. 

That chilled the enthusiasm for me to try anything else there, like the Aurender. I am highly skeptical of streaming software without a large community of users who are constantly improving it, and adding functionality. In my mind, nothing comes close to the Squeezebox Server for robustness, reliability, and flexibility. It's as bullet proof as Linux and Unix is -- totally dependable, and has been around much longer than these new kids on the block. After the invention of the compact disc, the Logitech Squeezebox and the associated server to me constitutes the biggest breakthrough and bang for the buck. The radio sized touch interface still remains the most visually intuitive and simple human interface for music streaming that has ever been devised. Nothing touches it for simplicity and clarity. The Sony streamers are ridiculously complex and slow as molasses in comparison. Have no experience with Aurender, but it's not open source, and being a dyed in wool computer scientist, I don't trust code that's not open source, and subject to massive improvement by a large group of users.

Sam

Vortexbox software sounds interesting, I will have to did out an old computer and give it a try over the winter.

My Mac Mini is a 2010 model.

Brian