Roon does hardware [Nucleus introduced in Munich]

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

@Sloop_John_B

One can only presume that they have done their marketing and the absence of a turnkey solution would be a limiting factor for the growth of Roon.

You nailed it. The HiFi dealer market requires turn-key hardware. Hard to sell someone $50,000 audio setup and then send them home to install Roon on a Mac.

@Sloop_John_B

On thinking about it this is quite a positive move as there will be a lot of people who would not fancy buying an Intel NUC and setting it up and would presume one of these products running ROCK would be the best nucleus/core for Roon.

Yup, exactly… and ROCK is coming out as soon as I get back from Munich (I’ll be back after a short break in Paris and a long sleep).

@Easysqueezy

Why so expensive?

Turn-key solutions sold through the HiFi retail channel require margins for the distributors and the dealers. If you want to do this cheap, use ROCK + build yourself a NUC. No one can compete on price with that. We will soon have a button on our website that will add the suggested components to your amazon shopping cart.

@allineedis

Pricing is always sensitive, but this should not be compared to an of the shelf NUC with the same specs.

To pull this of roon has to do marketing, build sales and distribution channels. Customer service for the hardware side, warranty, etc… there are a lot of costs that roon has to cover to make this viable.

Exactly. The most amazing thing about this release is that we are still able to provide the NUC + ROCK to the people that want the exact same thing in a more DIY solution for a significant price drop.

@guerph

Had I not already bought a i5 NUC kit intended for ROCK, I might actually have considered it.

That’s why I wanted people to hold off Some might not have cared about the price increase and wanted the fancy case.

@guerph

Roon is convinced Roon is priced fairly. They have been unwavering in its perceived value. They will not bundle Roon license with hardware.

100% correct assessment. It does not come with a license. You will need to buy that separately.

@Brice_Lang

out of my price range.

How about a NUC + SSD + RAM + ROCK for about $400?

@Brice_Lang

Could someone more experienced than me provide a ballpark estimate of what these specs would cost when piecing together a NUC from Intel’s website?

$400 for the i3 model.

@HTTP_404

I’m surprised that there’s no word from @danny or anyone else from Roon to us in an official capacity

we are all at the show still