Roon had been running badly on the SuperMicro servers. Time to see if we could figure out why and what to do about it. A little tinkering around found that our POP_OS VM was paging out over night and when we resumed play, it would page fault back in. Not the best UX. So, time to come up with a fix.
The other day, I had the urge to listen to Gumby and Modius to get a better feel for the difference between the two. So I put both in a Roon audio group and started a record playing in the group. Gumby remained on SPDIF. Modius was shifted to SPDIF. Different Roon Bridges served the common source to the two devices. Modius hung. I did some poking around the next day to see what I could learn.
This attempted experiment started a rather lengthy snipe hunt. Several misunderstandings on my part prolonged the hunt. The investigation uncovered a misunderstandings about MacOS System Information display and found a misconfigured Raspberry Pi based Roon endpoint. Read on for the details.
Featured image courtesy of Darko.Audio [1]
I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and recommend a piece of kit that I don’t actually own or use but that is a close cousin to kit in use here at Dismal Manor.
When Jason Stoddard, co-founder of Schiit Audio, has one of his periodic ask me anything interviews, a viewer invariably asks if Schiit will make an inexpensive streamer. Jason invariably answers, “no, that’s not our thing”. Jason has wisely chosen to avoid all the pain of what works with what in Linux Land.
But the question comes up sufficiently often that folks might like an answer. Back when I was looking for a streamer to replace AirPort Express and ChromeCast bits, I happened to discover John Darko’s Darko Audio YouTube channel. One evening, John reviewed the Allo Digital DigiOne Signature streamer and gave it marks that placed it firmly in high end sonic company with the Bluesound Node. After a bit, I ordered the boards and enclosure and put one together that I use in my lounge as my main stream receiver. I have a secondary HiFiBerry stream receiver that I use with the TV and video players.
In this article, I’ll tell you about a newer Allo Digital product that takes a bit different tack that will work nicely with today’s kit. That product is Allo Digital’s USBRIDGE Signature [2]. We’ll also look at what the more commercial products offer that is not part of the DIY streamers.
For a million years I’ve been scowling at Apple Music and the iTunes Store as Apple sold lossy-compression renderings of all of the music offered. All of the gripes to Apple Feedback finally payed off somewhat with the initiation of Apple Music Lossless. An earlier article explained the switchology of setting up Lossless streaming and downloads. This article talks about the results. It’s simple, Apple Lossless delivers the Red Book original. Spatial and Dolby Atmos are another thing. It’s all about the mastering, who did it and their goals for the mix.
Apple now offers bundles of online service under the Apple One logo. Here at Dismal Manor we have
Since my storage plan was $10/month, Apple TV+ was another $10, and Apple News another $10, changing to Apple One Premier was the same out of pocket and allowed me to add Apple Music to the mix. Read on to learn my impressions of the new Apple Music Lossless offering.
M1 iMac stock image courtesy of Apple.
I expect Apple Silicon to have a major impact on the functionality of the iMac. The addition of the custom rendering and custom machine learning hardware resources places the desktop Macs on par with the iPads and iPhones opening possibilities for audio and video processing on the new products. So I decided to be an early adopter while my 2017 iMac had some trade-in value.
In this post, I’ll talk about some things to consider in the pre-purchase planning phase.
Our Roon Core was last installed in 2018 using Ubuntu Cosmic Cuttlefish. This was a fall version with only 2 years of support available. Given that it had dropped out of support, I decided to reinstall the VM’s Guest OS. This post shares what I learned.
Roon Nucleus image courtesy of Roon Labs
After commenting on several posts regarding running Roon Core in a TrueNAS BHYVE VM in the Roon Community Forums, I get the occasional request for help troubleshooting a colicky Roon Core installation. Please stick to Roon recommended configurations unless you are a computer systems professional. Installation of Roon on Linux hardware or in a storage server virtual machine requires familiarity with the host operating system, host OS package manager, host OS virtual machine manager, creation of guest environments, and installation of Linux and applications in the guest environment. This is a lot to learn for non-professionals.
Most DIY-minded readers would be happiest running Roon Core on a Mac Mini backed up by a TrueNAS SOHO file server configuration. The Mac Mini can perform media management. The Mac Mini can back up your external media to TrueNAS using Time Machine. iX Systems ensures that TrueNAS is easily configured as a Time Machine storage server supporting encryption at rest and encryption in transit.
Those not members of the DIY gang would be happiest using Roon Nucleus as their Roon Core. Roon Labs has designed Nucleus to be a no fuss appliance that keeps OS and Roon Controller up to date software wise. Roon Nucleus is audibly and electrically quiet as a result of its fanless design and custom power supply that replaces the laptop switching power supply used with similar systems.
After the break, we’ll look at the alternatives in more detail.
A few days ago, I watched a young gentleman comment on selection of amplification for Magnepan Magneplanar Loudspeakers. He is a Maggie fan and has owned a number of Maggies and paired them with various new and used amplifiers. Although a good presenter, he managed not to offer much insight into Magneplanar speaker behavior. So, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned in the 5 months or so this pair has been here.
Roon and TrueNAS 12 coexist nicely. Here at Dismal Manor, I have a TrueNAS 12.0 server that has two jobs, to serve music and to provide Time Machine storage for MacOS Big Sur. In this episode, I will describe the TrueNAS configuration used here at Dismal Manor. This arrangement is not particularly elegant as I was learning to manage TrueNAS as it was evolving from FreeNAS 9 to the current TrueNAS 12 core.
Dismal Manor Dispatches 
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