Any Roon Nucleus users?

[David A]

Roon customer support told me whatever the Roon Server run on, it should not affect sound quality. Technically it just a music server, I surprised it makes a difference. The Nucleus is just the intel NPC with a different case, motherboard is exactly same, nothing is Optimized for audio...

Interesting. It is an Intel NUC in a finless case but "nothing is Optimized for audio..."?

Roon have a white paper document on the Nucleus which you can find at  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pUj-...__nuQ/edit   

It says:

"By tightly integrating high-performance hardware with an optimized operating system and purpose-built software, they provide a simple way to get the richest possible Roon experience."

That would suggest that there is some degree of optimisation. Later in the document they say:

"The operating system is assembled using a proprietary build system developed at Roon Labs. Each package that makes up Roon OS was selected and configured by hand, carefully considering how it will be used and making significant effort to keep the operating system as trim as possible, both while the system is running and at update time.

This custom approach is what enables Roon OS’s compartmentalized storage model, fast and atomic update system, quick boot, extremely small size, and runtime efficiency. It also means that our engineers fully understand the components that make up Roon OS end to end, and that we are in a position to keep things up to date or fix problems in any area of the system."

As to not affecting sound quality, I guess that's probably true at one level but if, for example, you want to use Roon's DSP functions to do some tasks like processing DSD files which can require more processing power than some other DSP tasks and you have a server which doesn't have sufficient power for that sort of processing then you would probably be justified in saying that it can affect sound quality. I also just read Kal Rubinson's comment on the Nucleus in Stereophile and the Nucleus can play multichannel music as well as 2 channel music. Some servers can't do that. For some people that may count as better sound quality if they prefer the sound of multichannel music to stereo. Being able to deliver bit perfect 2 channel music at it's original resolution with no signal processing whatsoever isn't the be all and end all test of sound quality for lots of people and not all servers handle signal processing or multichannel music equally well so I'd say that you can find differences in sound quality depending on how you're going to use the server.

BTW, it's not a "finless case". It's a fanless case and it has lots of fins  :-)