Ah - an oldie.

I committed to roon and completed this project after the start of covid. I sold the Nimbie for near what I paid for it so I was happy about that.

I run Roon ROCK on an old IBM NUC. It has a small 128 GB SSD for the database. But the music is on a synology NAS. Probably about 50,000 files. I also use QuBoz for streaming stuff I don't own.

For end points, I bought a few Blusound speakers for around the house. But my main system has a HiFiberry streamer. I don't see much value in expensive streamers and glad I didn't go that way. The hifiberry cost me < $175 and compares favorably to listening to music in my music studio through Genelecs and an RME interface.

I disagree about lossless vs compressed formats as space is so cheap. And I can tell when mp3's come up vs newer rips. But they're a mix of quality, esp if they're from the napster days.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the setup but Roon did not do a very good job of grouping compilations and I need to probably go through and fix some meta data to straighten them out.