Lots of opinions here. You’ll find people putting LPS on their nucleus. I do not speak for everyone.
However… if you are getting the playback in your chain that you expect (ie no drop outs, stutters, clicks) then my advice would be to invest in any other portion of your chain before your core - from an audio perspective.
However, if you want the computer for something else and you want your core to airways be on, just spend $136 and put ROCK (actually MOCK) on one of these.
I increasingly think that:
- People should use whatever they want as a core
- But if people want dirt simple and dedicated and they don’t have large libraries or do a lot of dsp, they should use a very very cheap nuc-box like the above
- And if people want lots of control and/or want to harness a much more powerful machine, they should install Roon server on Linux
- And people who want a piece of audio equipment should buy a nucleus
- And effectively 1-4 are functionally equivalent