Using Mac Mini as streamer plus music server

[Sailor4W]

@Sailor4W Good news! Have you compared the 6-core to an older 4-core Mini? I would suspect the difference not to be substantial because of Roon. The Nucleus only has an i3 chip and 4Gb RAM.

@audio_engr  Can you explain SQ increase in percentages? For example: soundstage, detail, clarity etc...

Sorry, I have no comparison to an older Mac Mini, as this is the first Mac Mini I bought. Before, I was using a Mac Book Pro. As I wanted to free the Mac Book (still need it for work), I was debating whether to buy a Nucleus or another computer. I decided for the Mac Mini, since many use it as a media server. Also a Mac Mini allows a certain flexibility to use it both, as a music server and a computer at the same time. Therefore, I opted for the most powerful setup I could get (except the 2 TB internal SSD, that was hard to get).

Now this thingy is powerful, period. It gets lukewarm at best. It has an extremely quiet fan. Initially, I didn‘t realize that it went off, I was just hearing a faint noise which I couldn’t locate, till I found out that it is the fan. But 2 metres away, you wouln‘t hear a thing!

I am still keeping an eye on a Nucleus. The local Devialet dealer is now playing around with a Nucleus for his shop and he is very excited about its performance, it seems to extremely fast, even the smaller Nucleus.

I am now playing around with Audirvana plus, it‘s a fascinating player, at least concerning the filters to play with! I installed the FabFilter Pro-Q 3 as a plug-in. Something I realized with my Expert 120 and it always bothered me, was an unpleasant ringing associated with high hats and cymbals. It is particularly annoying with Roon, giving the sound a somewhat nervous and fatiguing tone. In the FabFilter Pro-Q I chose a brick filter, filtering anything away above 20 kHz with a very steep roll off. Now my Devialet sounds super smooth, a joy to listen to. I have to see if I can transfer the filter settings to Roon‘s DSP, as I vastly prefer Roon‘s GUI over Audirvana.