Is Nucleus discontinued? [no, just not selling via online HiFi dealers anymore]

I just got this email from music direct

It is not discontinued, quite the opposite, sales and demand are doing better than ever.

What changed is that we modified our dealer terms to not allow online sales. It creates a conflict when we sell directly online as well.

Music Direct only sells online, so they can’t sell Nucleus anymore. They happened to have some spare inventory and trying to get rid of it quickly. If you want a Nucleus+, this is a great way to get one at a discount. I doubt this type of discount will ever happen again.

Hey Danny may I ask why Roon won’t allow online Nucleus sales? Just curious.

they do allow online sales. But now only from Roon itself. They don’t want other retailers also selling online.

Is this only for markets where you do sell (e.g. the US via Amazon), or is it a worldwide ban? I notice, for example, that a Dutch dealer has now marked Nucleus products as being “out of stock” for online sales, which may be a euphemism for “we aren’t allowed to sell them any more”…

US only.

Intel, unfortunately, is having a world-wide shortage on the boards we use. It’s a bad time to have these issues when our sales are growing so fast :frowning:

Most of the work in selling Nucleus comes from education and supporting the customer afterward. Giving retailers an ample margin for not doing any of that work is silly when we can just do that ourselves. We started to do that to see if it worked out, and we sold quite well. At some point, we were just competing with our dealers, and that’s not a good position for anyone. We finally made the hard decision and killed online sales. It hurts a few dealers, but it’s the right decision for us long-term.

Interesting, glad you guys continue with the production of the Nucleus. I am still hoping for the day you will sell the Nucleus case for NUC owners! :slight_smile:

This explains why no Nucleus is available anywhere (only N+)
I was worried as well, as the “regular” one is that I am after

I don’t understand that. If someone knows you, mabye he’ll buy directly from you. If someone only knows his dealer he even won’t know that you exist anymore. Shouldn’t it be irrelevant where I buy hardware from?

Roon will make more profit if they take all the online sales and I’m happy about that. I want Roon to be as profitable as possible.

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It should be if you only look at it from the point of view of the consumer. But there is a lot that goes into the manufacturer side of things.

When you buy a product from a dealer that you go see in person, that dealer does a sales pitch, closes the sale, and then supports the install afterwards.

When you buy online, the seller ends up doing the first 2, and Roon Labs ends up doing the support part. We saw this over and over with online sales.

Part of the margin we give up when selling via dealers is for introduction to new customers, and for their share in the support burden.

Now, think about when we sell on Amazon alongside another dealer. It’s (essentially) random whether we get the sale or the dealer does. What does the third party offer there? None of the 3 parts of the sale mentioned above. They don’t even provide some upfront cash to ease cashflow concerns, because the dealers usually get net terms. This makes no sense for us.

The non-Amazon-online-sales aren’t so black and white, which is why it took us time to reach this decision.

The more profit you make the faster the updates and the better they are and if its at no extra cost to the customer then I love it.

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In Europe you have to be careful about European directive (EC Directive 86/653). Very much depends on the contractual relationship between Roon and their agents.

We don’t have any agreements with dealers in Europe – only distributors. The distributors then work with dealers.

Additionally, this change does not impact Europe at all.

That’s good. The commercial agents regulations are probably equally or more relevant to distributors.

The law is designed to protect agents who build up a local business, often at significant cost, and then their principal (usually the manufacturer) ends the agreement unilaterally and sells direct in the same territory.

Wow…that is a bit tempting with a nice discount…I have a Nucleus newbie question though: my entire “ripped/downloaded” music library is on an external Thunderbolt 2.0 drive formatted in the Mac OS Extended Journaled format. Can I connect that to the Nucleus “as is” (I can connect it to my Mac Mini via Thunderbolt or USB) or does it need to be “formatted” ExFat or something else so that the OS on the nucleus can read it?? I was also thinking about getting a big internal SSD drive for the Nucleus if I ever splurged for one, but again not sure how to get my files transferred easily between formats.
thanks,
Doug

Yes, it’ll connect fine via USB (type-A).

While this should work for reading, we’ve seen mixed results with HFS+ as writable under Linux. I personally stick to exFAT for exactly this reason. It’s not always clear when you will need compatibility.

I would love to have bought a Nucleus but the lack of Ethernet out makes it unusable for me.
I need Ethernet for a direct connection to me Devialet amps. This is by far the best way to connect so i ended up with a NUC. (which is a bit noisy)

What is the deal in Australia ? I still see it every where available for on line ordering.

Of course Nucleus has Ethernet, it’s basically an Intel NUC.

Yes, but it doesn’t have WiFi so i can’t use Wifi Network and have direct Ethernet to my amps.

I should have stated it better.

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