My budget streamer for Roon

[insider9]

And should you wish to see pics in better quality click here

 

[newlash09]

Really impressive looking. You are a genius

The pics are awesome too. The completed streamer looks like mint. Very unlike a DIY job. Looks great in your setup.

And thanks for posting complete details of the parts used, would be ideal for others considering a similar build ( especially me )

And the screen shot of the roon audio path is clear. All understood now. Great job again. Iam impressed as well as inspired

 

[CnoEvil]

Truly impressive Dicking About. You have my admiration. *good*

 

[DougK]

Very impressive all round, I applaud you sir *clapping*

 

[insider9]

It does a job for my setup. The Roon path shows 3.8x processing but bear in mind that this is during Roon analysing the whole library using all 4 cores. I could throttle it but there's no point. Once that's done I'd expect the performance to raise, not how much by but at anything over 2x everything runs smooth. I'd say that for a single zone with DSP and without serious upsampling this is absolutely fine.

You can do a more expensive build but the whole thing works and was put together for less than the power supply in the PC it replaces

Sonically, I wish I could give any thoughts but I was fighting with Linux (which I don't know very well). It would somehow not mount external drive unless I've done it manually. Every time I reboot it would do it. So even though all was done before 3pm (no more than 4 hours hardware and software inlcuding updates and downloads) I had to apply final touches and learn a little bit more about Linux... *mail1*

What I've heard it sounds very good.

 

[insider9]

Truly impressive Dicking About. You have my admiration. *good*

Thank you Cno. I know it cost as much as a remote for some gear but I like the challange. There's not that much fun saying here's £10k... please, make it sound good. Anyone can do it. Well, anyone who has £10k to spend.

Very impressive all round, I applaud you sir *clapping*

Cheers, Doug. Much appreciated

 

[Tonestar1]

Well done sir! Looks brilliant. Makes you wonder how companies can charge 10x the price for an equivalent that you knocked up in an afternoon.

 

[insider9]

In all fairness it took me much longer to find the components at prices I'd be happy to pay and decide which combination to choose. But it is fiddly and with normal size hands for a bloke can be quite frustrating.

Also hardware will amount for a third of the cost if you include Roon lifetime membership. This is where most innovation is nowadays. Not to mention I don't count my labour or any overheads.

I do however agree the minute anything is made for audio enthusiast the price is doubled (at least).

 

[cheeseboy]

looks great. Apologies, i mis-read your first post that's why I said about the new intel mobo's, I thought you were using a non silent mobo. How are you finding the temps on the AMD cpu?

Goes to show what I've been saying for a long time about how most of the so called audiophile streamers are just off the shelf parts put together and then slapped with a massive markup, and most using open source (free) software. (not roon of course).

I hope it does well for you. I have a similar system myself, but used an older atom mobo with built in DC and a bigger case to fit in with the aesthetics of my current garb.

 

[insider9]

That's quite alright. That J5005 looked ideal and should it have been in stock and I had some DDR4 spare I'm sure I would consider it. As it is, it would add about £100 for mobile upgrade and DDR4 stick so not prohibitive. Although there's somewhat more satisfaction from getting it right the first time on such a low budget.

Full blast with all cores it was getting warm to touch. I didn't actually check but it was good warm, never hot. And once it settled temp was constant. Even hough the small case temp weren't a concern at a time of build. I believe it's well enough ventilated, only thing that's causing air obstruction is cable management which you can't make tidy but it doesn't show.

Since I don't know much about Vortexbox I will be playing with it today (while working) and the settings so can keep an eye at actual temps.

 

[Andrewjvt]

So a few months ago you reported that the digital coaxial input gave greater results than usb into your Rost.
So now the question: yes or no as you are using usb input I take now?

 

[insider9]

However I have been using USB not long after I posted the review. Wanted to check what was actually happening.

I'll write a retraction and an explanation on that thread as it will be more relevant there.

 

[Andrewjvt]

However I have been using USB not long after I posted the review. Wanted to check what was actually happening.

I'll write a retraction and an explanation on that thread as it will be more relevant there.

So now the obvious next step is to compare your built in a day, off the shelf streamer to say innous zennith top of the range for a blind test.

I'm betting and hoping for a zero difference.

This is a big step for a slap to the snake oil rip off merchant's.

In any case well done

 

[insider9]

Yes, comparison to Innuos would be welcome. But have something else and more exciting planed for foreseeable future.

See, I don't write about many of my experiments just the more significant and less geeky ones.

 

[Andrewjvt]

Yes, comparison to Innuos would be welcome. But have something else and more exciting planed for foreseeable future.

See, I don't write about many of my experiments just the more significant and less geeky ones.

Maybe some common sense is coming back to the forum.
It's time to turn the tables on the snake oil salesmen that prey on the osd nature of the paranoid audiophile looking for the best sound available.

 

[insider9]

I've been running stress test this morning on the APU

Idle temp - 46C
Stress tested (with Stress) all cores:
- after 10 minutes - 64.5C
- after 20 more minutes - 64.5C

As you can see these are safe and stable temps and quite impressive for small case with not one fan.

 

[cheeseboy]

I've been running stress test this morning on the APU

Idle temp - 46C Stress tested (with Stress) all cores: - after 10 minutes - 64.5C - after 20 more minutes - 64.5C

As you can see these are safe and stable temps and quite impressive for small case with not one fan.

nice, all looking sweet

 

[insider9]

I've been observing core utilisation with Htop and Roon is very well behaved. It can spike to 100% on one core at the begining of the track but settles with DSD64 (plus resampling and DSP) at circa 30% with little activity on other cores. When analysing if you allow it to use all cores it will go up to 100% however if you decide to play anything it will adjust accordingly so performance isn't affected. I'm using under about 50% of RAM whatever operation I've tried. Tops out at 48.7%.

With DSD256 played (again with resampling and DSP) Roon shows 1.2-1.3x speed. It did start playback after around 4 seconds but did play gapless. Just to make you realise what were talking about the file is 840MB for 4 minute 55 seconds *shok* Htop shows one core being utilised over 90% once again with little happening in other cores. This would mean that what I read about Roon is true and having stronger single core performance woul be better than many slowe cores. For anyone wanting to do a lot of resampling and heavy lifting I'd suggest a faster single core performance in which case J5005 would do very well.

 

[ellisdj]

you will want to isolate the activity on the main used core to Roon only and push eveything else to the others.

no idea how you do that in Linux

 

[Blacksabbath25]

Nice job mate !

Can you use windows by any chance as I have a copy of windows 7 doing nothing ?

 

[Q5]

Nice job mate !

Can you use windows by any chance as I have a copy of windows 7 doing nothing ?

Check out their website, it works on various OS.

https://roonlabs.com/

I use it myself.

 

[Blacksabbath25]

Nice job mate !

Can you use windows by any chance as I have a copy of windows 7 doing nothing ?

Check out their website, it works on various OS.

https://roonlabs.com/

I use it myself.

thanks for that yes it works with windows 7 but would it be a issue when windows stops supporting windows 7 in a couple of years ?

 

[insider9]

you will want to isolate the activity on the main used core to Roon only and push eveything else to the others.

no idea how you do that in Linux

I can see all the processes. In idle it uses 708Mb of RAM and has hardly any CPU use. There is literally nothing I can switch of that's unrelated. It's as bare as it gets. You don't get that with Windows.

Nice job mate !

Can you use windows by any chance as I have a copy of windows 7 doing nothing ?

Thanks Sabbath. And thanks for the offer but I really don't want Windows. Not only I belive it sounds worse and is worse for audio but the hardware I picked was not meant for Windows. What I have now works flawlessly and is already optimised. Windows would be a mine field to get tweaked not to mention it has much larger hardware expectations so I'd have to upgrade the streamer I just built.

 

[newlash09]

I've been observing core utilisation with Htop and Roon is very well behaved. It can spike to 100% on one core at the begining of the track but settles with DSD64 (plus resampling and DSP) at circa 30% with little activity on other cores. When analysing if you allow it to use all cores it will go up to 100% however if you decide to play anything it will adjust accordingly so performance isn't affected. I'm using under about 50% of RAM whatever operation I've tried. Tops out at 48.7%.

With DSD256 played (again with resampling and DSP) Roon shows 1.2-1.3x speed. It did start playback after around 4 seconds but did play gapless. Just to make you realise what were talking about the file is 840MB for 4 minute 55 seconds *shok* Htop shows one core being utilised over 90% once again with little happening in other cores. This would mean that what I read about Roon is true and having stronger single core performance woul be better than many slowe cores. For anyone wanting to do a lot of resampling and heavy lifting I'd suggest a faster single core performance in which case J5005 would do very well.

I was looking up that j5005 processor. And it is shown as a Intel pentium processor. Is this different from the normal i5 and i7 processors I hear more commonly about. Can I supplant this processor with an i5 for instance without needing an additional fan.

I find this build very interesting. There are lots of computer shops who can assemble computers as per my requirement in india. So I dont have to shell out big money for audiophile solutions. I could just buy the components off ebay and get someone to assemble them for me

 

[ellisdj]

you will want to isolate the activity on the main used core to Roon only and push eveything else to the others.

no idea how you do that in Linux

I can see all the processes. In idle it uses 708Mb of RAM and has hardly any CPU use. There is literally nothing I can switch of that's unrelated. It's as bare as it gets. You don't get that with Windows.

Nice job mate ! 

Can you use windows by any chance as I have a copy of windows 7 doing nothing ?

Thanks Sabbath. And thanks for the offer but I really don't want Windows. Not only I belive it sounds worse and is worse for audio but the hardware I picked was not meant for Windows. What I have now works flawlessly and is already optimised. Windows would be a mine field to get tweaked not to mention it has much larger hardware expectations so I'd have to upgrade the streamer I just built. 

that's not what I mean - you want just 1 core for the audio service with nothing else using it. it doesn't matter on the usage (less is usually better as you know) it's the core isolation that's important
the software's I use do it but you can do it manually. Must be a way in Linux to set that