Roon Nucleus Plus in My Future

[ejr1953]

I've been running Roon on an I7-based Dell laptop with 12 gigs of RAM, streaming Tidal, playing purchased or stored from CD AIFF files, on an external USB 4tb hard drive.

The Windows machine is "good", but not "great", as it has all sorts of other things running, sometimes the streaming just stops.

So, I decided to "take the plunge" and order from Roon their Nucleus Plus machine.

When it arrives, I'll import the Roon setup from my backup, and have my iPad app point to the new Roon core on the Nucleus.

I'll use the USB connection to my external hard drive and to my PS Audio DirectStream DAC.

I'll report back on the results after I've had time to make the transition and enjoy the new setup.

[Chris]

We will be interested in your experience. I helped Russ Katz setup his Roon server a while back and I think he is pleased with the performance. While setting up and running a Roon system is very straight forward, it is imperative that your local area network is properly configured and stable. Otherwise all sorts of gremlins can intrude on your music listening. When possible, always use wired ethernet connections. The Roon server itself should be hard wired with ethernet. Remote clients can be wireless, but your most stable performance will be ethernet. As far as networks go, I recommend modern mesh networks such as Google's Wifi Hub product available for a couple hundred dollars. Routers provided by cable companies such as Fios are very poor especially for WiFi.

While you wait for you Roon server, you might want to read my thread about DIY Roon servers here.

[thevinylrevivers]

I am also a Roon dealer. I'm sorry that you didn't call me before placing your order. I could have helped you out. Chris did a great job getting me up and running. I initially was running Roon through a Mac Mini. The results were awful. I then upgraded to a MacBook Pro with a 1 TB solid state internal drive. The results were much better. However, I started running into problems as my library grew. Things have been running flawlessly since switching over to the Roon Nucleus +. Good luck.

[ejr1953]

Russ,

The sound you hear is me kicking myself for not ordering the Roon Nucleus Plus from you!  I bought this thing "on the spur of the moment".

I had a hard drive failure on my "main" home machine and while it was at the shop, I used my Dell music laptop as my "main" computer, installing MS Office, HP all-in-one software, etc. on it, as the computer doctor let me know my "main" machine was not worth fixing, and waiting for its replacement to be built and shipped was going to take a while.

Since then the music machine would occasionally stop streaming, while it was doing "who knows what".  I'm pretty sure it was the polling the HP all-in-one software was doing, but didn't see a way I could turn that "off", without uninstalling the HP software.

One night, after a LONG work day, I was down in my "man cave" and using the Tidal app on my music machine, I got repeated interruptions in my streaming, and Tidal hardly ever does that.  I just happened to get an email from Roon, one click after another and the Roon Nucleus Plus was ordered.