Tons of power management stuff was added so it runs cool until it needs to run full blast. It’s meant to run always on.
1 Like
9 posts were split to a new topic: Wake-On-LAN for Nucleus?
Wow that’s certainly shattered my mental picture of @danny as middle aged and portly, who are the other guys in the picture?
.sjb
3 Likes
From left to right:
Christopher Rieke, Danny Dulai, Enno Vandermeer, Steve Silberman, Rob Darling
?!@!!
hahahahaha… seriously man… seriously.
3 Likes
Nope. That would be me. 
2 Likes
Hey @danny while you’re getting the Nucleus / ROCK web content ready, don’t forget to update the 4th paragraph in “About the company” on the jobs page.
+1
Roon is a broad church!
1 Like
Surely that’s exactly what ROCK is about. Put it away and forget it if you wish.
Implementing WOL requires the BIOS, NIC and the OS to work together. I believe the NUC satisfies the first two requirements; if wouldn’t be difficult to get the OS to do the necessary - especially if you’re writing it.
However, thinking about it some more, it probably won’t happen: ROCK/Nucleus is designed to be a turn on/turn off piece of kit, and incorporating optional bells and whistles, even small ones, is not on.
Are there any performance benefits to going the Nucleus route vs. NUC/ROCK, or is the benefit purely convenience and aesthetic?
That will probably depend on the included (and the optional) power supply and your intended use. As a server it’s surely just convenience and aesthetics, as a standalone streamer it may be more.
1 Like
I can’t imagine a power supply matters unless it is also your endpoint.
Making a product that can actually be manufactured then sold by salespeople to customers is a very different kind of problem than piecing together components to build one DIY media server.
The distributor, dealer, and salesperson all get a piece of the sale–and the price reflects it. We have a very nice stable of Roon Ready and Roon Tested devices already being sold through this channel already. Nucleus allows Roon to be sold alongside them in a way that makes sense in that environment.
But more to the point–it’s not an accident that ROCK is being made available free of charge–there are plenty of people like you that we need to serve well, too, and we want you to have the same quality of experience as people who buy the box. If you’re capable of building and supporting media server hardware yourself, do that and install ROCK.
At the same time, we’d like to reach audiences who demand a turnkey experience–and that means no hardware to build and no software to install. Nucleus will help us accomplish that.
Fanless is about flexibility. If it had a fan, it would make a nasty experience for anyone who did happen to put it in the listening room. By not using a fan, those people have the option. And the salespeople working with them have more flexibility when building the system.
Not everyone is as educated, as open to inconvenience, or as committed to getting every detail “right” as the crowd on this forum–but just about anyone can be annoyed by fan noise.
15 Likes
I applaud it. Most people I know have not been candidates for Roon until now.
2 Likes
I think it’s appropriate to speak to what an amazing commitment Roon Labs is making to the present user community with the above comment. It bears repeating that the yearly or lifetime subscription to the Roon software is expected to grant the purchaser all updates and new features to Roon Software itself. ROCK/RoonOS is a customized operating system to ease installation and optimize performance of RoonServer, but represents a distinct development effort by the RoonLabs team. There is a strong temptation to mentally lump these two together, but nothing in conventional software development pricing structures and practices obligates RoonLabs to offer ROCK at no additional charge.
I think Microsoft presents it is a useful analogy to provide context. The suite of Microsoft Office products are now offered as a subscription service to customers. As long as one is current on the monthly/yearly fee, one can expect full updates an improvements related to Microsoft Office. However, this does not entitle the Office365 subscriber to a free Windows10 license. Windows is sold as a separate product, and probably always will be. As an analogy to Nucleus, it is certainly possible to build a high end Windows10 desktop computer more cheaply than the prices charged by Dell, but a) the price of Windows10 is rolled into the Dell price, and b) people are willing to pay more for something that just works with no assembly required.
Of course, there are business benefits to RoonLabs making ROCK available free of charge in order to reduce support burden and broaden its user base. However, it would not be out of line for them to charge separately for RoonOS or force you to buy their hardware in order to access that development stream. We don’t see Sonore distributing its SonicOrbiter OS free to all users who would like to buy their own RPi or other DIY solution. You have to buy the SOSE or microRendu.
If you can’t understand why anyone would pay extra for a Nucleus instead of building their own NUC, buy the NUC, install ROCK, and be happy. At the same time, please do recognize that nowhere in the Roon agreement are they compelled to offer ROCK/RoonOS free of charge. If we as a community complain too much about unexpected free perks extending outside of the core Roon software, RoonLabs may not feel so inclined to make them free in the future.
12 Likes
It does feel a bit like that. I suspect because it is natural for people to judge a new product/service against their own need for it. I won’t be buying a Nucleus, but I’m very pleased they exist so that people for whom that solution is the right fit can enjoy Roon.
I expect that most people on this Forum could build an inexpensive ROCK capable NUC in under 10 minutes, blindfolded under a blanket with the Barney the Dinosaur song playing looped at full volume through headphones. But others just don’t enjoy that sort of thing.
11 Likes
4 posts were split to a new topic: Nucleus i7 powerful enough?
@JWC. Thank you. You echo my sentiments on this subject completely, and have expressed them much better than I could have 
. When I made my Annual Subscription to ROON, I did not expect to be treated to ROCK! I just now await that recommended shopping list 
.
1 Like
Are there any figures on power consumption of the Corei7 version in its ‘quiescent’ mode? Thanks