Hi, All; true weirdness of an event here. I finally bought a USB thumb drive so that I’d have a good backup of Roon, plugged it into the back of the Nucleus, thought I told the Settings to back up to it just right and…the next two times I played music through my setup it sounded like utter garbage. Way worse than my old Chromecast. Then I switched and played it through my Bluesound Node 2i, which runs through the Nucleus (playing the same song, “Fire & Rain” on its own, not going through Roon’s app) and it sounded pristine, lovely and great. Switched to playing it through the Nucleus: garbage. Turned the whole thing off, unplugged most everything, took the thumb drive out restarted and…Roon sounded beautiful. The USB drive is now in my pocket. What happened, and what did I do wrong? Any thoughts/guesses?
No idea what’s going on with the sound of your Nucleus, but my ROCK NUC has eaten so many backup thumb drives that I no longer use those. They have also corrupted the whole database before to the point of having to start over again (and it corrupted the backup on it so I had to REALLY start over again). Now I backup to a Synology NAS and a small USB powered external SSD and it’s all been good. I think ROON should really have a no thumb drive sticky.
Glad to see it’s not just me. Thank you, Charles.
What is the DAC in this setup? If it’s a USB DAC, I’m not surprised.
No external DAC at all. Nothing but the USB thumb drive.
So, are you saying Node 2i sounded worse when using Nucleus with the thumb drive and Roon app, but sounded good with the Bluesound app? And after restarting the Nucleus with the thumb drive removed, the Node 2i sounded good via Roon app as well?
Room Nucleus.
Relative to itself before putting in the for-backup USB thumb drive.
Yes, exactly what I’m saying.
This is stange, but I have noticed in this forum that BluOS / Bluesound customers seem to have lots of weird problems.
My experience, though, David was the reverse: great sound with BlueSound, not so with Roon. Not sure what the mystery issue was, but all is in alignment right now.
Exactly.
Bluesound / BluOS folks seem to rarely have great results with Roon…or the ones who do are not vocal about it. From what I can tell, BluOS / Bluesound and Roon are competing ecosystems that do not play well together.
If you are happy with Bluesound, stick with that and avoid adding Roon to the mix. If you like Roon, my advice is to consider replacing your BluOS devices with endpoints that work properly with Roon.
Mixing the two seems to create no end of misery. If you are masochistic and misery is what you enjoy, by all means, mix away. 
Nucleus uses a Linux kernel. My experience with Linux over decades is that it can limp along with a rather flaky drive, but all the retries and error logging take a big performance toll. Which in the present situation could affect Roon’s ability to stream without glitches.
I’m happy to report it is all working well together. Maybe Roon did some sort of improvement.
I run ROON on an Intel NUC 10i7 and have both a Bluesound Powernode 2i and Node 2i. I am very happy with this set up and have not run into any problems. They are playing together well in my setup and sound GREAT! I think some of the problems have to do with the pre 2i units.
Yup. Sounds spectacular. Listening to Beck’s “Morning” album on TIDAL in Master’s Quality. Couldn’t ask for more.