I don’t know but I can report what I have found.
Tidal app running on MAC Mini 1.7Ghz i7 dual core 8Gb RAM - dropouts rare but crashes daily even when not playing. Possibly not Tidal issue as iTunes used to crash too. (I suspect memory leak perhaps in the way these programs use the display and cache artwork)
RoonServer running on MAC Mini 1.7 GHz i7 dual core 8Gb RAM - stable without any problem whatsoever for three weeks so far.
Got rid of Tidal and iTunes and now decided to run RoonServer permanently and my Mac has NEVER been this stable in years of ownership.
With Roon the interface is fantastic with background info on almost everything I own and links - the iPad or IPhone display is superb so I no longer use my HD TV as a display and can select music from any mobile device.
I don’t have a huge collection - about 5000 albums.
Roon is perhaps expensive ($500 for lifetime) but I feel this is the best bargain I have EVER found in my life long pursuit of audio. It has the closest feel to being able to browse albums in a record store. It is setup to play any file from my collection or Tidal and pass that natively (bit perfect) to my DAC. I like my DAC to do all conversion as it has a very solid upsampling approach in the GHz frequencies. The nice thing is Roon will do all manner of conversion and some filtering choices for me if I had an inferior DAC or wanted to play with the original files before passing them to a DAC. I hope they eventually add album inner gatefold sleeve artwork or the booklets that come with box collections as that is the only thing I miss now....
Tidal app running on MAC Mini 1.7Ghz i7 dual core 8Gb RAM - dropouts rare but crashes daily even when not playing. Possibly not Tidal issue as iTunes used to crash too. (I suspect memory leak perhaps in the way these programs use the display and cache artwork)
RoonServer running on MAC Mini 1.7 GHz i7 dual core 8Gb RAM - stable without any problem whatsoever for three weeks so far.
Got rid of Tidal and iTunes and now decided to run RoonServer permanently and my Mac has NEVER been this stable in years of ownership.
With Roon the interface is fantastic with background info on almost everything I own and links - the iPad or IPhone display is superb so I no longer use my HD TV as a display and can select music from any mobile device.
I don’t have a huge collection - about 5000 albums.
Roon is perhaps expensive ($500 for lifetime) but I feel this is the best bargain I have EVER found in my life long pursuit of audio. It has the closest feel to being able to browse albums in a record store. It is setup to play any file from my collection or Tidal and pass that natively (bit perfect) to my DAC. I like my DAC to do all conversion as it has a very solid upsampling approach in the GHz frequencies. The nice thing is Roon will do all manner of conversion and some filtering choices for me if I had an inferior DAC or wanted to play with the original files before passing them to a DAC. I hope they eventually add album inner gatefold sleeve artwork or the booklets that come with box collections as that is the only thing I miss now....