My old tower desktop sounded like a Tractor , but I listening was nowhere near it . I converted to a 10i7 NUC with a SSD which is virtually silent except when you are actually adding content , in “play mode” its silent
I use open back headphones but never hear anything extraneous. I have noise cancelling phones to eliminate the parrot noise 
Nearly added SWMBO but …
i have been running it on a Intel NUC7I7 with 16GB RAM. Roon has a NAS connected with a database of 100.000 songs and Quobuz / Tidal Masters and has been running non stop for months now. The only issue i encountered was a NUC I7 issue only. These models are known for not being good at removing internal heat caused by running it. This was solved by capping the cpu output to 80% Without it the system could sometimes just shut down. Idiotic i know! My previous NUC5I5 with 16GB RAM also worked without issues in the same setup by the way and did not had that heat issue.
Both NUCs were bought second hand with official Windows 10 installed and the NUC I7 cost me less then 250 euro. So no reason here as well to buy a Nucleus.
However I admire “computer literacy” but do not accept “computer illiteracy” and the lack of the preface computer twice in the following paragraph of your original post I was commenting on.
A further example is extracted from another post.
“From the illiterate user perspective, you have to see the whole computer thing from ISP to endpoints as a giant black box. I probably should not have said “server” but “IT environment” or whatever. Whether the router dies or the HD breaks, makes no difference to the user at least initially”.
FYI
OED “Illiterate” 1 Unable to read 2 Uneducated.
Hence my suggestion that “Computer savvy” or computer non-savvy would be a better choice of words.
JMPOV
The point was clear, I think, and it’s an established term, which was chosen because one needs to learn the concepts of computing in the same way as one needs to learn how to read.
Obviously I wrote (il)literate several times because I was too lazy to write computer illiterate 10 times on the phone.
There is, however, a bit of a relationship because mom can read newspapers and books just fine, but apparently has a temporary loss of her reading skill when the words appear on a computer screen.
In any case, none of this is putting down people who don’t know computers in detail. I meant to explain that these people exist, and that catering to them, if possible, is a worthwhile goal for a company.
I read hundreds of comments on here of people with all of these do it yourself boxes and old mac computers and they all seem to have issue after issue. I started with my 2008 iMac as a server and had the fans come on after listening for a while, so I got a Nucleus about 3 years ago and except for rebooting it once in a while, I have never had an issue at all.
a. It is made to run Roon Software with no other frivolous software to bog it down.
b. It is Dead Quiet.
c. Dependable is putting it mildly.
Steve glad yours has been reliable, as have both the Nucs I have built in the last 4 years (and hopefully will last the next few years as well)
You can’t spend a lot of time on the forums or you could not have failed to see quite a number of user’s with serious problems with to their Nucleus devices.
I’m sure it’s a great product and I would recommend it to non technical users that were friends of mine that are too far away to offer help too. At the end of the day it’s a computer and computer’s have issues with power supplies, memory, hard disk and this is as likely to happen with a Nucleus as it is with a self built NUC which is about 20% of the price and generally much more powerful.
But it depends on all of our our specific set of skills
I started to use a Mac mini as a source in my system something 9 years ago (using Roon around three years ago) and I am still using it. I have made some improvements: bigger RAM and replaced the original HDD with two SSD’s (clear improvement in sound)
Three times in the last 5 years I have taken my Mac mini to a dealer and compared it with “audio servers” like Innuos or Antipodes: Innuos Zen Mini sounded a little bit better and Antipodes K-50 sounded clearly better … but, and this is a big BUT, there are other parts of my equipment, mainly loudspeakers, where I will get more improvement changing them so Inprefer to keep my Mac mini and go for better loudspeakers…
My advice: go to a dealer with your Mac mini and compare the sound using your computer and any of the models they have. And then, if it is ok for you, start looking for the right music server for you
Comparing servers in terms of SQ is a futile exercise. There’s nothing musical happening there. Dealers are known to convince people with “an open mind” that power cables make a difference in SQ, so I’m not surprised their servers “sounded” better.
Indeed. Check out TheraP’s post from April of 2020.
NUC - 2nd hand from eBay for less than $120. Rock on NUC, put it in a different room and hardwire it to your network player. In my case, the database is on my all backed up NAS, but of course, on the NUC is fine as well.
Cheap enough, no worries about looks and noises and it‘s been running absolutely flawlessly for over three years now.
Hmm difficult one but here’s my thought process. Since I got mine I have had two Macs which I also used for work. All it does it curate my music collection and play it beautifully. It is hardly ever switched off. It is on an Ethernet network and just works. Nothing really get in its way. I think of it rather like my Dad, sensible, reliable, always there for you? Emotional clap trap, yes but I have no regrets and my Mac will be obsolete before I know it.
here some perfectly good reasons
Enjoy your new Nucleus!
One more reason:
Companies can price things as they wish, and customers can make their own decisions. Some customers actually like paying ludicrous amounts of money for simple things, because it shows that they can and makes them feel special. That’s a kind of “value”.
I keep hearing things in my music that i haven’t heard before every time I sit down to re-listen, without even having changed my system in any way. Listening to a piece of music is an organic event that is new and different each time. I think this statement of “hearing little things you.ve never heard before” is mostly used for justifying a new expense. ( Oh-Oh! I just opened a can of worms!)
All of your points are correct with one exception. Roon has stated that the Nucleus OS incorporates thermal management that ROCK does not. Whether that makes a difference to anyone is obviously a personal choice. It doesn’t seem to matter to the thousands of ROCK users out there.
Question is: what kind of difference can that make?
It will matter for high CPU load use cases, such as with the most demanding DSP settings. Even with the standard fan, a NUC can overheat in those situations and go into thermal throttling that makes it too slow for the specified task. Yes, I’ve seen this happen. Thermal management is even more critical for fanless servers like the Nucleus.
It happened to me too, back when I was still using air cooling. The heat sink was so full of dust, the machine simply shut down during moderate load.
But if the hardware can’t handle full load, what can the software thermal management do other than throttle down?
Load-specific throttling can adapt the load and processor speed more flexibly than dumb BIOS throttling. That’s what current iOS and Android does for smartphones, for instance.