Roon Nucleus Advantages

More powerful spec, not necessarily better performance with Roon. What has been left out of the Nucleus is in my opinion as important as what has been included. In addition, raw processing power also needs to be balanced against cooling capacity.

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We’re all actually paying good money for using roon and for them providing a software to run on nuc is the bare minimun, otherwise no one will buy it

You obviously don’t need a ‘better’ hardware spec than the Nucleus/+ provides to run Roon well, otherwise Roon would have b****** well included it in their Nucleus/+ spec! :nerd_face:

I wonder if you would have drawn this conclusion if ROCK wasn’t available and there was only Nucleus?

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It’s obvious that @Sean_Schwoerer doesn’t realise that the Nucleus/+ is very much a ‘turn-key’ product/solution for Roon. One that I very much welcomed.
He obviously wants to tinker. That’s fine. ‘Each to their own’.

Not everyone runs a NUC for Roon. Plenty of folks use Roon on PC or Mac. You’re correct that it is in Roon’s interest to provide a NUC solution but they could have charged for it.

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Yes, I would have come to same conclusion, Regardless. I unfortunately know the cost associated with each of the components. My mouth still drops on the cost charged for some of the audio gear offered for what one gets. When it comes to a basic Intel Desktop.

I’m already paying a yearly or lifetime membership on top of the hardware purchase. If the hardware came with the lifetime license then this would be completely different as i’m paying for the software on top of the hardware…

The nucleus isn’t anything special, sorry to say… It’s an intel desktop with heat sinks with basic desktop features.

Btw, I don’t want to tinker as implied.

‘Tinkering’ to me, is having to assemble a NUC and load ROCK. I didn’t want to do this.
The Nucleus is marketed as a ‘turn-key’ Roon product. That’s it’s appeal. And I think it’s great.
VFM is subjective. Each to their own.

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It generally comes with dealer support. That’s… special, because you need someone who’s going to have to deal with setting up a rather complex device, for a non-technical (and probably rather demanding) customer, and who’s ready to get moped at if anything at all goes belly-up.

That, and this is highly subjective, but Nucleus also doesn’t look like it was hit by a truck (compared to an HDPlex case) or hit by a truck and then trampled by a horde of zombies (Akasa).

I’m all for building yourself, and I think it’s the way to go in this case, but please, find another passive NUC (not a quasi-NUC, an actual NUC7/8 board with a place to put a SATA drive) that’s passively cooled, doesn’t look like it was designed by a 12 year old with eye-hand coordination problems, and price it.

I’ve looked around quite a bit, and from what I’ve seen, there’s the ShapedMedia, but I don’t know if they sell it or what boards you can put in there, there’s a LogicSupply/OnLogic with no public pricing, there’s a Swiss option that’s cheaper than a Nucleus ($800 for the i3, the gap widens with the i7 at $1300, so we’re still talking $400 for a decent-looking passive case, a little bit of thermal paste and screwdriver knowledge here) before shipping, taxes, and installing ROCK, and maybe there’s something from TranquilPC in the UK, but it sure ain’t on their site.

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Or someplace out of the way, in which case, you don’t care what the heck it looks like.

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BTW; Could consider AMD proc solution as they are giving Intel a run for their money based on speed, cores and threads on the mid range side of desktop. I’m neither partial to intel or AMD.

Here are sizing suggestions.

TL;DR, if you have less than let’s say 700’000 or 800’000 tracks in your library, it’s probably better to stick to supported NUCs if possible. Above that, well…

With Roon in general, low idle consumption > high horsepower. This isn’t Red Dead Redemption, and outside of rather specific cases, awesomeness doesn’t scale. That’s why moar powaaa (so more heat, more noise both electrical and physical, more electricity draw) is detrimental. If yours is not an edge case, you might as well leave good enough alone, so please let people know what your use case is, i.e, how many simultaneous streams you intend to need, how many tracks are in your library, whether you want to upsample things, etc.

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