I have been using a MacMini as my Roon Core for some time. Could someone describe the benefits of adding a Nucleus to the mix over using the MacMini? Thanks!
Eric if you’re Mac Mini works fine then I would say not a lot. Nucleus is an appliance and just work’s (ignore the threads here).
It’s benefits (like running Rock on a Nuc) are that it only runs Roon and is paired back to only have what it needs to do that and associated network sharing etc.
If your Mac work’s fine for you and you are not otherwise looking at replacing it then stick with what you have. If you are looking at replacing it then that’s a different story.
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Michael, thanks for the perspective. I have had no issues with my MacMini and plan to keep it. I was confirming that the nucleus would stand in the mini’s place but would not add anything extra. Thanks for confirming that!
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While i agree that a Nucleus/ROCK will not add functionality i would like to point to that it does something outside of what you might expect.
And to me that is the important non-functional property of “availability”. They don’t consume a lot of power and is designed to be on at all times. (most likely below 10W while idle, depending on drive setup etc)
This makes a world of difference to me, compared to when i chose to start Roon on my laptop as an example. But a dedicated ROCK/Nucleus Core is also “out of sight, out of mind” in a way that other Roon Servers don’t match.
I realise this isn’t an issue for many people but if you manicure a local library of a few terabytes of data, each startup/update is a nuisance.
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When I used a Mac Mini as the Roon core, I found that I had to reboot it fairly often, whereas this is rare with the Nucleus.
More controversially, I found that direct connection of the Nucleus via USB to my DAC sounded better than either direct connection of the Mac Mini or streaming via a variety of streamers (lots of people on the forum will tell you that I must be imagining this; all I know is that I’m not switching back).
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I would read the upgrade topics and see what OS/Platforms typically have the most issues.
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