General thoughts, cost/benefit of Roon Nucleus and Nucleus+

[Sailor4W]

Sorry to chime in this late, but I was abroad.

I deliberately bought a Mac Mini 2018 for use as a music server. The MacMini is an i7 with 16 GB RAM, a 1 TB internal SSD ans a 2 TB external SSD and is hard wired via Cat 7a Ethernet to my Devialet. At first, I quite liked the sound from the Mac Mini, but after a while I noticed that it was a bit shrill and started to get quite fatiguing with long listening sessions.

So I asked my local dealer for a Nucleus loan. When connected to my system, the shrillness was immediately gone and the sound was pleasing right from the start! So quite some improvement compared to the Mac Mini.

The Nucleus is dead quiet, fast, and absolutely reliable. I was also debating whether I should buy a Nucleus +, but with my simple setup (no simultaneous streaming to several zones at a time) and given my smallish library (about 400 albums, about 30% High Res), the Nucleus breaks no sweat.

I am streaming my music to a WiFi repeater via Ethernet, and from there on via WiFi to my Devialet. I find the sound a bit more detailed than going straight Ethernet to the Dev.

So all in all, the Nucleus is definitely a plus for my system!

The next step will be to upgrade my Expert 120 to the 220 Expert Pro to make my system Roon Ready ?

Thanks for the response!  I’m wondering if I would notice a difference between the Nucleus and my ROCK NUC.  It doesn’t sound shrill at all to me, and seems to be breaking in a bit.  Wondering how different the NUC board is in the Nucleus.  I am using an 8th gen which has a different ethernet chipset.

My guess is there‘s not much difference, if at all, between the Nucleus and a NUC. I just didn’t feel like playing about with a NUC and transferring it to a fabless case. According to Roon, the Nucleus is basically an i3 NUC. 

Using an 8th gen NUC is exactly the point: some of the 7th gen NUCs are being phased out, while the 8th gen NUCs aren‘t approved by Roon yet. So I wanted to go the safe route.

Pretty pleased with my Roon/Nucleus setup!