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I just heard that Harmon acquired Roon. I'm glad I already have my lifetime membership as I guess prices will go up.

https://news.harman.com/releases/harman ... y-platform

I hope so, for your sake. Unlike those "forever" digital purchases from iTunes. A number of my purchases have disappeared. Good thing I downloaded therm and backed them up.

Hello everyone,
yes it seems when companies like that take over prices go up also some products are dropped .

Sincerely Richard

My Roon Nucleus + died suddenly a few weeks ago while it was under the 2 year warranty. They sent me a call tag, repaired it and I got it back within a week including shipping. Great service. All the internal components are on one board inside. When it came back I added an internal SSD for music storage. I'm including photos. Note that the processor board has a 250GB PCie SSD on board to run the processes. The PCie format uses multiple lines for data flow where SATA uses only one which greatly speed up data transfer, in some cases for this PCie 4 as much as 8GB/s.

Tom,

Thanks for the picture, I never have seen the inside of a Nucleus, but it confirmed my understanding that all it is a repackaging of an Intel 7i7 (7th generation i7) NUC kit in a fanless case of Roon's own design. Note that NUCs are up to 13th generation and continued production has been transferred from Intel to ASUS. I recently built my own updated "Nucleus" with a Gen 13 i5 in an AKASA fanless case, running ROCK (which is the same OS as running on the Nucleus). If you have an out of warranty failure in the future, this can be an option since 7th generation NUC boards are long out of the market. I am sure for now ROON has a stash of them, but that is not forever. Unfortunately, due to differences in heatsinking (both footprint and dissipation), and I/O interfaces between different generations of NUC boards, you may not be able to replace the board with a later generation version. Just something to be aware of in the future. Pete was running into issues with his Nucleus (one in-warranty repair, plus recent issues out of warranty that may or may not have been hardware related), and he was looking into finding a used NUC or NUC kit board of the same generation as backup. That may be a good option for you to pursue, since it is pretty easy to replace NUC boards, having done it a few times.

David

David:

I will sometime in the near future try an experiment that I thought of while the Nucleus was away for repair. I have been using an i7 desktop running windows 10 Pro but stripped down as a bridge using Roon Bridge. It connects via USB to my Danville dspNexus 2/8 which provides all of the remaining functions between the bridge and 4 stereo amplifiers. It is a reasonably powerful machine so in the interim I decided to load Roon Server on it negating the need for the bridge function. For music, I connected a 2TB USB drive that had all my music files loaded.

In this configuration, I was quite surprised with the quality of the sound. So to explore some questions about what is the best way to handle digital music, I will be trying the following.

First, I will use the Nucleus with the internal SSD feeding the bridge over my ethernet network. Second, I will use the Nucleus but pull the music files from my NAS. Third, I will eliminate the Nucleus and use Roon Server on my i7 with the music files coming from the USB external drive as I did during the absence of the Nucleus. Fourth, I will use the i7 with the music files coming from my NAS. Fifth, I will use the i7 with the music files loaded on the internal 1TB SSD.

As you can imagine, this is a lot of work and will take some time to implement. I'll report the findings when I am done. On thing I have noticed, is that with the amount of processing power in the Nucleus, when I played the same track recorded in 44/16 wav, aiff, flac, 128 DSD, or 256 DSD, with casual listening I could not tell an immediate difference. I will also work on that more.

Tom

Tom, I think you'd also want to compare the Nucleus with internal storage to your i7 with internal storage directly (both ethernet in usb out)?

As you and I have discussed on the phone but for the benefit of others, our experience has been; music on a NAS>Roon Server>a secondary switch (reclocking)>ethernet optical galvanic isolation>bridge (out via usb)>dac has produced the best results for us though that's a lot.

There is a significant difference in your system being fully active, but we're all using upsampling and or upscaling d to a conversion too, just not separating out channels. Perhaps the crossover processing changes something so the source path isn't as significant? We've never heard a Roon Server/renderer (ethernet in and usb out to a dac) sound as good as described above. No flames. What sounds best there, sounds best, it's just interesting.