10-Nov-2018, 23:26
Peppa,
To add to what Pim said:
You're running your Mac Mini. As well as dealing with Roon streaming music it's keeping it's video output active and processing a video signal showing what Roon is doing plus your background screen with its menu bar and dock and probably other things visible. If you have other applications visible its watching those applications for activity. If you have a mail app open the mail app is probably regularly checking for mail, downloading new messages from time to time, and writing those messages to your hard drive while accessing that drive or a different drive to stream your music. There's timers running for things like the screen saver, it's watching for regular scheduled activities, it can be updating other active apps in the background, it can be performing scheduled backups, and so on. All of those things take up processor time and can add noise, either physical noise or electrical noise, to the overall environment and the processor time devoted to those activities reduces the resources available for Roon. A lot of the time there may enough processor capability available for Roon for Roon processor performance not to be impacted but sometimes it may be impacted, and all of that extraneous activity may be adding noise to the Roon output signal which isn't added when Roon is the only thing running.
When you run Roon on a dedicated server like my Antipodes or an Innuos device or NUC or Roon Nucleus, the processor is doing none of those things. There are no other activities running besides Roon, there's no video output from the server even if you're running the Roon app on a device like an iPad for control. At most there's data being sent to the control device to enable it for its visual display so the server isn't doing any video processing at all and there's minimal background activity going on. Roon has maximum processor access at all times so its activity is not going to be impacted and there are far fewer activities going on to generate noise.
Is it possible to design a computer which can do all of the things you have your Mac Mini doing at the same time when you're running Roon and without impacting on Roon? Probably, but that would be a computer optimised for running Roon and giving it precedence over everything else while Roon is running. The Mac Mini and other general purpose desktop and laptop computers aren't such a device. They're designed for multi-tasking and the people who design them don't consider audio performance as their highest priority. How much impact do those other activities have on Roon's activity and output? I don't know. A lot of the time it may well be negligible and in any event it's going to depend on how you use your computer and what you have active. You can do things like shutting down other apps when you're using Roon but how much background activity do you want to shut down?
When you run a dedicated server you make that question irrelevant. You can leave your computer doing all of the things it normally does when it's on and not worry about the question. The computer can be optimised specifically for audio streaming performance. Will you hear a difference? I don't know but I do know that I don't get some of the non-audible problems I used to get such as audio playback dropping out for some reason or other as frequently since I moved to my server rather than running Roon on the Mac Mini. Part of that is due to moving to a network setup that doesn't use wifi in the music signal path and the only wifi traffic involved being between the iPad and the server for control purposes, not for music signal transmission, but that is still a benefit the server brought to my system.
If you move to a server rather than your Mac Mini, the move is going to change more than just what the processor is doing while you're using Roon. Other things in your network setup change as well and even if they don't impact on sound quality they can impact positively on how well your music streaming activities work. Sound quality is important but it's not the only area where using a server can make a difference and it may not be the biggest area where it makes a difference in your system.
If you can you should try borrowing a server which can run Roon and link it to wherever your music files are currently stored as well as to your Devialet and see if it does make a difference in sound quality or in some other area. If it does make a difference you may not think it makes a big enough difference to justify the cost, or you may decide that there are other alternatives which deliver better value for money such as streaming to a Roon Ready endpoint such as an Auralic Aries Mini or something else which can feed a signal to your Devialet, or you may decide to go with a server and there's always the possibility that you may decide that those options don't improve on what you're getting doing things the way you're doing them now, but you will learn something that will answer a lot of your questions for you.
We can talk about this for days and weeks and never resolve your questions to your satisfaction. Actually trying a server in your setup is going to tell you a lot more of what you want to know than anything any of us can tell you, and it will tell you those things in the only way that is really going to resolve your questions with any real certainty for you. In the end the only real way any of us have to resolve some of our questions about audio systems is for us to try the "suck it and see" test, to actually try things out in our own homes and our own systems. Hands on experience resolves questions and issues in a way that nothing else can ever resolve them.
To add to what Pim said:
You're running your Mac Mini. As well as dealing with Roon streaming music it's keeping it's video output active and processing a video signal showing what Roon is doing plus your background screen with its menu bar and dock and probably other things visible. If you have other applications visible its watching those applications for activity. If you have a mail app open the mail app is probably regularly checking for mail, downloading new messages from time to time, and writing those messages to your hard drive while accessing that drive or a different drive to stream your music. There's timers running for things like the screen saver, it's watching for regular scheduled activities, it can be updating other active apps in the background, it can be performing scheduled backups, and so on. All of those things take up processor time and can add noise, either physical noise or electrical noise, to the overall environment and the processor time devoted to those activities reduces the resources available for Roon. A lot of the time there may enough processor capability available for Roon for Roon processor performance not to be impacted but sometimes it may be impacted, and all of that extraneous activity may be adding noise to the Roon output signal which isn't added when Roon is the only thing running.
When you run Roon on a dedicated server like my Antipodes or an Innuos device or NUC or Roon Nucleus, the processor is doing none of those things. There are no other activities running besides Roon, there's no video output from the server even if you're running the Roon app on a device like an iPad for control. At most there's data being sent to the control device to enable it for its visual display so the server isn't doing any video processing at all and there's minimal background activity going on. Roon has maximum processor access at all times so its activity is not going to be impacted and there are far fewer activities going on to generate noise.
Is it possible to design a computer which can do all of the things you have your Mac Mini doing at the same time when you're running Roon and without impacting on Roon? Probably, but that would be a computer optimised for running Roon and giving it precedence over everything else while Roon is running. The Mac Mini and other general purpose desktop and laptop computers aren't such a device. They're designed for multi-tasking and the people who design them don't consider audio performance as their highest priority. How much impact do those other activities have on Roon's activity and output? I don't know. A lot of the time it may well be negligible and in any event it's going to depend on how you use your computer and what you have active. You can do things like shutting down other apps when you're using Roon but how much background activity do you want to shut down?
When you run a dedicated server you make that question irrelevant. You can leave your computer doing all of the things it normally does when it's on and not worry about the question. The computer can be optimised specifically for audio streaming performance. Will you hear a difference? I don't know but I do know that I don't get some of the non-audible problems I used to get such as audio playback dropping out for some reason or other as frequently since I moved to my server rather than running Roon on the Mac Mini. Part of that is due to moving to a network setup that doesn't use wifi in the music signal path and the only wifi traffic involved being between the iPad and the server for control purposes, not for music signal transmission, but that is still a benefit the server brought to my system.
If you move to a server rather than your Mac Mini, the move is going to change more than just what the processor is doing while you're using Roon. Other things in your network setup change as well and even if they don't impact on sound quality they can impact positively on how well your music streaming activities work. Sound quality is important but it's not the only area where using a server can make a difference and it may not be the biggest area where it makes a difference in your system.
If you can you should try borrowing a server which can run Roon and link it to wherever your music files are currently stored as well as to your Devialet and see if it does make a difference in sound quality or in some other area. If it does make a difference you may not think it makes a big enough difference to justify the cost, or you may decide that there are other alternatives which deliver better value for money such as streaming to a Roon Ready endpoint such as an Auralic Aries Mini or something else which can feed a signal to your Devialet, or you may decide to go with a server and there's always the possibility that you may decide that those options don't improve on what you're getting doing things the way you're doing them now, but you will learn something that will answer a lot of your questions for you.
We can talk about this for days and weeks and never resolve your questions to your satisfaction. Actually trying a server in your setup is going to tell you a lot more of what you want to know than anything any of us can tell you, and it will tell you those things in the only way that is really going to resolve your questions with any real certainty for you. In the end the only real way any of us have to resolve some of our questions about audio systems is for us to try the "suck it and see" test, to actually try things out in our own homes and our own systems. Hands on experience resolves questions and issues in a way that nothing else can ever resolve them.
Roon Nucleus+, Devilalet Expert 140 Pro CI, Focal Sopra 2, PS Audio P12, Keces P8 LPS, Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with optical fibre link to my router, Shunyata Alpha NR and Sigma NR power cables, Shunyata Sigma ethernet cables, Shunyata Alpha V2 speaker cables, Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack, RealTRAPS acoustic treatment.
Brisbane, Qld, Australia
