The more I think about this the more I think it makes total sense for Roon.
I strongly suspect user experience and customer satisfaction is much better with a ROCK or Nucleus.
When users are spending 100s buying NUCs, why not get some of that action?
And users with Lifetime are unlikely to represent future revenue unless you can sell them something else- presumably some of them already have Nucleus, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re distinctly in the minority.
Presumably ROCK will be supported for a long while yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Roon want to get pretty much all of us using their hardware.
I have absolutely no need for this, but I’ll be so tempted when it’s available in Europe, it just looks so much nicer than a NUC (and, IMO, much nicer than the Titan)
I don’t care what processor it has.
I don’t care what motherboard is in it.
I don’t care how much memory it has.
If Jamie says fan noise hasn’t been an issue, that’s good enough for me.
The only thing I care about is if I can take the hard drive out of my ROCK and drop it in without reformatting (and if I do, so what?). This is exactly what I’ve been wanting. A minimum effort appliance that looks good enough to be in my media room and can feed USB to my DACs that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars.
Order placed. Thank you Roon Team!
7 Likes
Torben_Rick
(Torben - A Dane living in Hamburg - Roon Lifer)
135
Sure - The only problem is that the current supply of the models that Roon has approved is soon coming to an end. The NUC13 is still OK - but that is not approved by Roon.
Danny said months ago that they have something good in the pipeline for ROCK but he couldn’t say what, yet, at the time, because their partners weren’t ready. I’m sure it will come now that the new Roon devices are being announced
Torben_Rick
(Torben - A Dane living in Hamburg - Roon Lifer)
137
I have a Nucleus with Samsung SSD 860 EVO 4TB (2TB full) for internal storage. Can I simply remove the Samsung drive and install it in the Nucleus One and have it recognized? (Not questioning my install skills. Those are fine. More, wondering if changes in hardware, firmware, OS make transferring the stored music more complicated.)
Thanks,
Bill
ASUS have announced their successors to the Intel-branded NUCs, so I expect the Roon Labs list of supported NUC models to be updated once the ASUS models start hitting the market.
I’m sorry to hear that your Node 2 went sticky. That’s a bummer! I wanted to quickly comment on the physical characteristics of the One since we’ve gotten a few questions about that.
The majority of One’s housing is stamped steel. Only the top shell that fits around the metal enclosure is molded polycarbonate. We erred on the side of caution in our press release description because the most visible portion of the device is plastic.
Thank you, @Curtis, I really appreciate that. I’ve always been honest about my personal experience with products. I’ve not heard the fan once over the last few months I’ve used the One. If it’s ever kicked on, I haven’t been aware of it. And the Nucleus One sits inside my BDI AV cabinet in my main listening room.
If you formatted your drive with the ROCK GUI, you should be fine. I pulled my 4TB WD SSD storage drive out of my old Rev-A Nucleus Plus, dropped it into the Nucleus One, restored my latest Roon backup, and was off to the races—easy-peasy.
I’ll be posting a blog in the next few days with more details on my Nucleus One experience thus far.
I’m wondering if this product would improve my current setup.
My Roon Core is on my iMac. My modest home library resides on a USB SD drive connected to the iMac.
The iMac ethernet connection is through a Cisco Catalyst Switch.
My DAC is a PS Audio Directstream with the Bridge streaming feature. The DAC and iMac are in separate rooms and a wired connection is not practical for me. So I use a pair of TPLink Powerline adapters for the ethernet connection to the DAC.
All of this works quite well for me but now that it’s available at a lower price (and because I have ZERO DIY skills – or interest – to build my own) this new Nucleus is of interest to me, to get my Roon setup off my iMac.
If your iMac works well for your library, Nucleus (or anything else) will not make any improvement. If you do want to be able to use the iMac for other things without Roon and whatever else you do interfering, then something like Nucleus One would make sense.
My setup sounds very much like Geoff’s. My iMac is of the late 2013 variety, however, and can’t be upgraded beyond Catalina. While that’s probably adequate for this old man’s pretty basic computer needs, I think the day is rapidly approaching when the latest Roon build won’t be supported.
Thinking very seriously about the Nucleus One, and perhaps a 1 or 2 TB SSD, although I use Roon mostly for streaming.
perhaps a 1 or 2 TB SSD, although I use Roon mostly for streaming.
FWIW I’m 50:50 with this, though I expect my library to grow given the few months I’ve had Roon to play with.
If I was to project my future demands, 4 TB could be more appropriate, as this would start to approach the limits of this mid-market i7 laptop (if we also include the streamers).
To be safe, I’d recommend the 2 TB, as the price difference (should) be trivial. This puts a fair local library at ~ 4,000 albums.
Yes, how does the N1 compare to a NUC7i7DN board as used in the N+?
However until my NUC7i7DNKE running ROCK either goes bang or is seriously performance compromised, I see no reason to change.
I moved from a NUC5i3MYKE, in ‘22, with a 100k track library, despite no performance issues, just the NUC7 into crossed my path at a good price in a world of rising prices on the Intel NUCs.
@miguelito , my experience tells me a couple USB ports, an Ethernet port and an HDMI port are no indication of processing power. Roon doesn’t disclose specs, and rightly so for an appliance. In time we’ll get some idea of the cpu and installed RAM (which can’t be updated without voiding the warranty). Most importantly, Roon understands their customers needs, and I have no doubt the One will deliver. Cheers.
Understood. But when I compare that with the back of a NUC, for example, I don’t see any USB-C or Thunderbolt ports or much of anything else. It looks to me like a very barebones build - and one that is likely available on Aliexpress or similar (I actually did an image search of the back ports but didn’t find anything like it).
Regardless, all of this speculation misses the point: It is a cheap build, probably i3-class or Celeron, and that’s enough for less than 10,000 tracks. Fine. No issues.
Well I have 21k albums. But the more important bit is if you need to do transcoding - that might require processing power that exceeds the One specs. Fine.
