Under $4K Roon server with clock input and best quality ethernet out?

[davide256]

You really ought to try Euphony Stylus on your NUC before you continue down the Roon path. I gave up on Roon this year and my DAC options aren’t even as revealing as yours... Roon didn’t  have the same clarity 

[davide256]

4 hours ago, jbm_2021 said:

Thanks Dave. I already invested in the Roon lifetime license a year ago. If there is something better, I am interested to try. I will give the Euphony stylus a try. I guess this is going to take some learning as I want to save the image of the roon core and do a complete build of the Euphony. Would you mind elaborating your setup? I never felt the Roon clarity was lacking, but hey until I try, how would I know 😀

Trialing Euphony Stylus is pretty easy, all you need is an 8gb USB memory stick to flash the boot image to and theres no linux knowledge required.

You can also switch to Rooncore under Euphony, useful if you want to explore information about a recording. Best sound is using  NAS sourced music, Qobuz and Tidal are also integrated.

A useful feature of Euphony is its buffer playlist to RAM, should have at least 8gb RAM, preferably 16gb for DSD albums. If you decide you like Stylus, I would suggest buying  Optane memory for the OS drive so that you can run a diskless system. Power supply is important, the Superfarad 3 or better should be fine.

In my setup I have a Uptone Audio JS-2 PS so can run all NUC BIOS acceleration options, with 16GB RAM, 16 GB Optane, Wifi disabled, connected to an Etherregen with Synology NAS library. While I like Roons GUI, playback always sounds wispy/fuzzy in comparison to the tone color purity of Stylus, I have to use HQPlayer endpoint service/w upsampling to make Roon palatable