I think the better option for ROON is to use a cheap computer in another room, away from your stereo. Then use fibre optic streaming to eliminate the noise that would be picked up getting the bits from the other room into your DAC. Using Fibre with a PC computer is the key to even the score of not buying an expensive Music Server next to your audio gear.
I have a $300 DELL PC computer hidden behind a door in a faraway room. It is running ROON Core. It automatically goes to sleep at 2:30AM so that I also have to go to sleep. It wakes up at 7:00AM ready for another day of music.
All of this using Windows 10 or 11. I forgot since I do not have a mouse, keyboard, or monitor hooked up to it. I hardly ever look at the OS. I used RDP to first setup the settings I wanted for the OS and to install ROON Core, I cannot recall the last time I had to look at the OS.
Only caveat to using the PC far from the audio system is to use the ROON Core on the direct Ethernet side of your home network. That is if you use PowerLine adapters as I also do (for multiple rooms), then have the PC on the Ethernet and not on the PowerLine side. This is if you want to stream Hi-res.
I discovered an issue streaming the hi-res version of George Harrison’s ALL THINGS MUST PASS. There is a song where he starts whistling. The stream would always break at that spot when I used to have the PC on the PowerLine side of the network (lower capacity side). Move it to the higher capacity side and the whistling part works perfectly all the time.
