Buying a Nucleus -- the long view

I was going to start a similar thread but this is almost exactly my scenario, so I’ll jump in here.

I’ve been running an ancient old Windows box to run Roon core. But it needs a rebuild with a new hard drive and just isn’t worth supporting anymore. So I’m looking for a new solution.

I have the skills to build my own, but no time for a new project right now. So I’d be happy to pay a bit more for an easy to support/maintain “out of the box” solution. But I’m looking for a system that I can get several years of life out of.

What keeps me from just hitting “buy now” on the Nucleus is that I’m not super happy about paying a premium for old hardware specs. When will we see a HW refresh on the Nucleus? Which chipset is used and how long will Intel support it?

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There are several sources for suitable boxes that can run Windows/Roon or Rock. One is here https://silentpc.com/. I’m not endorsing them, but I bought a fanless desktop from them about five years ago and it has been one of my best PC purchases in years. Certainly much cheaper than a Nucleus.

The long view? About ten or more years worth of a Roon sub or a Roon lifetime plus a few years of Qobuz/Tidal between taking a couple of hours and building a better spec’ed fanless one of your own or buying a Nucleus +. I know what I did, and my 7i5 in an Akasa case has been going strong for many years now. It was dead easy to do - there’s a youtube video for everything now! But of course money is all relative, so I see why the Nucleus would be a nice proposition for many.

Roon Hardware support and my lifetime subscription.
I started using my Dell Precision laptop with Roon. I liked it so I got a lifetime subscription and bought a Nucleus that worked for a short time. I spent countless hours with the worst tech support since Dos 2.0. I got a lot of wrong information for diagnosis and was finally told I needed a Nucleus Plus. For the first 2 months it worked fine then stopped working. Again did all the diagnostic procedures around my not so simple network and after a few months gave up for the better part of the year and had stopped listening to music. Recently my wife got mad at me for spending $4000 AUD on the plus so I tried again to figure out the issue. This time I was put in contact with someone from Roon who diagnosed the issue in 5 minutes, a failed motherboard. Since I live downunder in Oz I was told to contact the dealer. I requested a replacement unit. The dealer got it back from the distributor who made the following comment: “This unit was repaired. A brand new main board was installed. Aside from the
chassis and SSD, it’s essentially a new unit.
Kind regards,
Tom”
Well “essentially a new unit " is made by taking the M2boot drive, the one that is prone to fail, off the old motherboard and installing it on the new motherboard. Dealer told me as follows " If your SSD fails in the future please feel free to contact us and we will be more than happy to get your unit repaired accordingly.” Nevermind I had to buy two Nucleus and had the second one fail in a month or two and had no music for the better part of the year, now I have to see how long the $50 me boot drive part will last in the repair of my $4000 Nucleus plus
Not a happy camper!

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My Roon Nucleus M.2 drive failed after a little over 3 years of 24/7 use. I got a replacement drive from Amazon for US$25.93 and installed the drive and Roon in about an hour. Danny tweaked the Roon version from ROCK to Nucleus and that was that.

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I still own a couple of the Control 10/15. Pity that they cannot use the screen controls in ROON. Was it just the external PSU that failed? If so replacements are available.

The PSU blew and so did the Control 15. I tried a new PSU to no avail…Ratz!

see the roon nucleus+ for sale on Roon Community services … FS: Roon Nucleus+ Rev B with 1TB disk and 5TB USB - Sales and Trades - Roon Labs Community

You’re considering the “nuclear option”, eh?

You’re basically paying above and beyond the cost of a NUC for a pretty box, a turnkey product and Roon support. If the latter goes away, you’ll have a standard PC with which you can do as you please (after “nuking” the hard drive). Either way, it will eventually join the rest of your fleet of obsolete PC’s.

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I use the Meridian 218 with Nucleus as well and second the SQ and simplicity. It just works with no BS. I would pull the trigger on the Nucleus no second thought.

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A M2 Mac Mini is $499. That’s what I’ll aim for next. I am still using my 2014 Mac Mini with upgraded SSD

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at the end of the day its a “re-boxed” NUC , alright a nice and expensive one. If (perish the thought) Roon went belly up , install Windows or Linux , as you say, and its back to being a normal computer.

Its more obvious if you went the NUC route , which is far more cost effective anyway. A NUC with ROCK behaves just as an appliance s the Nucleus does , the Nucleus is fanless and silent.

I chose a 10i7 NUC / 256 SSD / 32 Gb RAM and put a 4Tb SSD in it . TBH haven’t touched it since apart from plugging an extra USB external drive into it

Perhaps think of the Nucleus as just a consumer product like any other. I’m going to buy a new TV soon and I’m umming an hawing about what price bracket to go for as well as what brand. When I eventually make my mind up, it will be with the knowledge that the one I choose won’t be as good as some others and will at the same time be better than some others. And I know full well that in a few years I’ll be changing it for a new model. A Roon music server is, to me, very similar: there are cheaper alternatives that do exactly the same thing and more expensive alternatives that do the same thing; they may have better or worse build quality, they may be as easy or harder to set up. All of them, one day or another, may have to be replaced - Roon is, for me, the best software for music; tomorrow, it may not be… If the Nucleus makes sense to you as just another disposable thing that will last a while and then be superseded, and you’re happy to pay the premium because you believe it to be worth paying (and only you can decide that), well go for it.

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I agree! I am not sure why it matters whether a consumer chooses a NUC or a Nucleus? No one seems to care whether one chooses an “LG OLED” or a Samsung “QLED” television, a Mac or a PC, or a Corvette vs a Ferrari… all of which are at significantly different price points. If one wishes to save some money and has the inclination to “fuss” with computers assemble a NUC, otherwise grab a Nucleus if you prefers a dedicated and more simple application….next!

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Considering the current review in Stereophile of a $100k DAC, the Nucleus can be seen as a veritable bargain!

Following up on last week’s post, the replies got me spending some hours researching HW specs and ROCK install procedures (the time overhead that I was willing to pay a premium to avoid :laughing: ) so at that point I figured I should just order a new NUC. I’m still waiting on the RAM though (which is incredibly cheap these days).

The current plan is to just use the NUC case for now unless it’s too loud. But I’m guessing it can’t be louder than the old computer it’s replacing. I got the tall model so I have the option to add storage. My NAS has been pretty static in recent years since any “new” library adds are usually coming from Tidal. So I may just get a 4GB SSD and make a copy of my local library and then I’ll have a music server that can travel with me.

Next step: ROCK install

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Update for those following along. The ROCK install itself was super easy and the documentation is great. I’m not sure why the ffmpeg codec isn’t just included in the build, but I’m guessing its a licensing issue. But no worries.

I did run into a problem with the backup restoration. 2 problems actually:

  1. Using the “restore from backup” link on the connection screen, after restoration, I got “connection failed” messages on the clients. Tried multiple variations of reboots, re-restoring the backup, and restarting from scratch but couldn’t get that to work. UNTIL I reflashed ROCK from scratch, started up Roon while skipping any setup options (didn’t add NAS link, didn’t login to Tidal - just an empty fresh install). Then ROCK could update to the latest Roon build (which probably matched my backup and initialized other files), and I could restore the backup from the settings->backup screen. Even then it required another reboot to actually connect, but now I’m g2g.

  2. Next issue is that the backup didn’t preserve the data I thought it would. Prepping for the migration, I spent a lot of time last weekend cleaning up my metadata (e.g., with apologies to “Crazyhorse”, I generally just look up their albums by searching for “Neil Young”, etc.). But after restoring on the ROCK, it required re-connecting to my NAS, which then re-imported all of those thousands of tracks/albums back into my library. And none of my previous cleanup from last weekend persisted. Not a huge deal, but will require more time to clean up again.

The good news, the ROCK/NUC is much faster than the old HP with a corrupt spinning disk that I had been using. It’s much smaller & quieter & likely uses much less power. I don’t mess around with my systems much anymore - I just want to setup & forget them. I add music to the library as I find new (or old) tracks that catch my ear, occasionally tweak the organization if it gets messy (like the previous example where importing a new album might create 3 new artists that I don’t care to have cluttering up my library), but mostly just want to listen and discover and not worry about keeping the computer working. So I hope to get several years out of this one now that it’s running.

Closing with the original question - is a Nucleus worth it? Well, I spent ~$800 on a new core-i7 NUC12 w/500GB SSD & 16GB RAM (overkill but SSDs & RAM are so cheap now - you don’t save much money going smaller anymore). I probably spent 5 hrs researching NUC specs and 5-10 hrs reading forum posts, install links, debugging backup restoration. So it all comes down to how much I value my time. I don’t regret building, but my long view is that if Nucleus were on newer spec HW, I probably would just buy the Nucleus if I did it again. But I have a hard time spending premium money on old HW (even if it “does the job”, it still has limited life support by Intel & others) and by the time I sunk 5+ hours into research, it was a no-brainer to build on new HW.

Just my experience - hope it helps others to make decisions.

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I certainly do. If you buy an OLED TV you’re getting an actual ‘Organic Light Emitting Diode’ TV, which is currently the state of the art. “QLED” is (IMO) just so much marketing speak.

So I took your advice and went for a Cirrus7. Shipping costs to the US erased some but not all of the significant cost savings relative to the Nucleus, and I got an i5 instead of the Nucleus’s i3.

So far it seems to work well, though I have lots of new Roon issues to work through. For instance:

I finally got everything configured to play 5.1 files, but there are incredibly annoying audible glitches when playing 5.1 files via HDMI, which worked without these problems when using a MacBook as my core. Sounds like a cross between “pops” on an LP and timing errors.

I thought digital would put endless fiddling around behind me…

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