Roon Nucleus versus Small Green Computer

I have first hand experience with both Roon OS on ROCK and sonicOrbiter OS.

Both fantastic.

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For Roon? Only Roon OS (the OS that powers ROCK and Nucleus) has updates integrated directly into Roon apps.

For other apps/systems? SGC for sure. It is a very capable box with support for many products, not just Roon.

For performance? I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the spec differences. We’ve yet to find a system that would run better than a Nuclues+ on an SGC or any other Linux based server. You can put in more RAM, SSD, or CPU, and you’d be hard pressed to find a difference in real world experience for 99.9% of use cases.

Thanks for the info Danny. The Nucleus does seem to work very well.

@Robert_Schaub I’ve had two Small Green Computer servers in my system and I can vouch for their performance, reliability and the support both SGC and Sonore offer (I also have Sonore’s microRendu and Signature Rendu SE).

I cannot speak to performance differentials vs the Nucleus / Nucleus +

However, (in favor of SGC) having an Ethernet Output direct to a player is a major plus — a feature with benefits. :slight_smile:

I just spotted this. I said ROCK had reliability in spades. I didn’t necessarily think people would assume that I thought SGC didn’t, but it is relevant in a Roon specific environment where as a user I can vouch for the Nucleus OS where as I can’t for the SO i7. However there are others here who can and have. With regards to hardware support and dealers, my presumption was people might come here for help and diagnosis first, and I know dealers ask here too.

Thanks for the clarifications D.

No worries…we expect these things to be more similar than different in the end.

Danny, can you expand on this? And did you mean to say [or] an SCG (instead of on)? Thanks.

Sorry… I wrote what I meant, but it was awkwardly phrased.

Let me try again:

When building the Nucleus, we had many options at the time, including the much faster (and quad-core) NUC6i7, and the slower NUC7i5 – what we found is that the extra cores rarely any difference to Roon members, and in the most common conditions, they are even less relevant.

For example, configured properly, you can drive even the fastest DSD upsampling crossed with sanely built convolution filters, in multiple zones, on the NUC7i7BN (dual core).

So while a quad-core machine would be nicer for audio analysis, and running tons of simultaneous zones doing crazy expensive DSP, it doesn’t warrant the heat generation, cost, size, and numerous other downsides.

That said, the new NUC7i7DN supposedly has the same TDP as the NUC7i3BN, with the i7 performance and 4 cores. We’ve got some of them in-house, and have been doing real-world testing with them. While they are more capable, almost no one will notice. We will probably use them at some point, but we won’t make a big deal out of them when we do.

One really great thing about Roon OS is that because we build the entire OS from the ground up, not only is it optimized for the CPU architecture we build it for, we are able to remove a ton of stuff that normally runs on a Linux based OS. We’ve also been able to tune the kernel for running RoonServer. Sometimes making decisions that would be detrimental to other software.

The last part is that RoonServer and Roon have many fast-paths and special cases to perform better on Nucleus because we can make assumptions about what’s happening on the other end. This relates to file system and network configuration, and the fact that we always ship on SSDs.

Thanks. Very helpful!

Hello,

Thanks for the helpful explanation. It makes sense intuitively.

However, since that makes the Nucleus[+] a turnkey ROCK NUC with the same processor, amount of RAM, and size SSD as a particular NUC–which also has no fan–in a much more elegant enclosure, why is the price of the Nucleus[+] so much higher than a ROCK NUC?

I don’t mean that as a criticism, I’m wondering what makes the Nucleus[+] cost so much more to make?

Thanks very much.

Danny will expand and correct me, but regarding what I’ve quoted, the price differences also factor dealer sales network / support / associated mark-ups (for Nucleus & Plus) vs DIY (ROCK’ed NUC).

SGC sell and ship direct to end customers.

That makes sense. More of an audio dealer approach than, say, Woo Audio or the Vinnie Rossi LiO factory-direct business model (although Woo has started to offer headphone amps through the Audio Advisor).

I can see why a non-computer-literate audiophile would want to buy a Nucleus[+] from the same place they get their streaming DAC (at least), and the Nucleus[+] really is very pretty.

I’ve decided that, as a first test, I’m going to move my 13” MBP running Roon Server as the only App into the bedroom and connect it to my AirPort Extreme with an AQ Vodka RJ/E cable. That may clear up my stability issues while I save for other things, although I understand why the Nuckeus[+] or SGC would sound better than a non-optimzed 13” MBP.

@dabassgoesboomboom is correct about the turn-key, dealer supported, system w/ a margin structure to match it.

There is also the fancy case and the work that went into the operating system. As far as I know, no one out there, including SGC, has built from scratch – everyone uses a server or desktop Linux distribution and trims.

Our alternative to Nucleus for the DIY/hands-on/tinkering community was ROCK ($0) + NUC/RAM/SSD ($cheap) from Amazon for a total price that no manufacturer can compete with.

We didn’t have to give that away for free. We did so since it was the other extreme from the buttoned up turn-key Nucleus option, and we didn’t want to leave those users hanging.

We also added features to Nucleus that we didn’t add to ROCK, such as the Crestron/Control4 module support. We will be adding more to Nucleus in the future via software updates.

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That makes sense. Thank you.

Regarding this feature - is there any technical reason why it can’t come to ROCK’ed NUCs? If so, can you share the reason/s.

I’m not trying to answer for Roon, but software can cost an awfully lot to develop well, so you have to factor that into the price, and some things just can’t be given away for free unless you intended to write open source from the beginning.

Noted but in this case we’re just guessing. Hopefully Danny can share the specific technical reason/s.

Maybe it’s not a technical reason and just a sales decision to push more people towards Nucleus and that’s fine of course. Just interested.

It is very very very similar. The base is identical, very little differs.

@Robert_Schaub got some of it right, but here is a hardware consistency and support angle too. I wrote about this here:

I’m an old-school programmer back when you had to write everything in C or LISP from the bottom up including your own OS-level memory management routines, virtual memoriy support, I/O subroutines, platform-specific optimizationns and more before you even even started building the UX graphical or not and OO-design was only used for windowing systmems—which is why Xerox PARC developed it for their Altos machines—long before Java existed or got ported from the browser to the server. Apple’s Objective-C is a superset of C and dialect of SmallTalk, another LISP-inspired idea that came out of PARC. I’m not quoting history books. I was there and knew the people who did it all. Back in those days, programming languages fell into two categories, languages that ran a machine and languages that manipulated symbols. There was an intersection of the two but they were not the same thing. These days, most software developers only know symbol manipulation in what amount, at one level or another, interpreters, such as the Java VM. Roon clearly knows about OS-level code dedicated to specific machine configurations in, if I’m not mistaken, C as invented by K&R to implement UNIX at Bell Labs, Linux being a variant of UNIX. Creating your own build and version control systems to support your own OS requires people who know more than algorithmics but understand how the target machine platform works because that’s the only way to get true optimization. There is no “Java chip”. That’s why it’s so hard and you can’t just give it away unless you’re Google who are doing so not because it’s cheap but it indirectly supports their income stream, all of which comes from search and targeted advertising as opposed to software sales.

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