14-Sep-2019, 18:21
(13-Sep-2019, 13:25)Confused Wrote: The Melco's "raison d'etre" has always been very high quality, low noise, storage and delivery of music files. In the past there were repots of Melco trying to run Roon on the original N1A and N1Z. Apparently this was problematic due to the lack of power in the ARM processor, so this was abandoned and the Melcos never became" Roon Ready" as a core device.
So the N1A / N1Z cannot be used as a Roon core, only a Roon end point? You could have Roon core on a PC or whatever, and feed this to the Melco, but then you lose the Melco's prime function of low noise music storage. I guess you could store files on the Melco, these could be picked up by a noisy PC or whatever running Roon core, and then you could send these back to the Melco as a Roon end point, but having the electrically noisy PC in the middle of this chain seems to me to eliminate the benefits of Melco's electrically quiet file storage.
So what is the idea behind of all this? I am a little puzzled.
You have a point there. Would have been great if Melco was able to run Roon core.
With Melco as an end-point, the signal from the PC / Roon core can be routed through the Melco, with some potential benefits albeit less than if the signal was kept completely within the Melco.
Without this Roon end-point function, the Melco would just have been a (quite expensive) NAS feeding the PC / Roon core which then feeds the (potentially noisier) signal to the DAC.
Could this approach also be similar to the dual PC setup advocated by some as sounding better - a control PC running Roon core + the audio PC (substitute Melco here) connected to the DAC?