Roon Nucleus (Servers)

[One and a half]

Munich was in May. surely by now they would have a clue as to when,  it is after all four months,  so coming soon tells me May 2018.

[One and a half]

Here's a review from Phile Web of the Roon nucleus compared to a laptop (google translate). The ancillary equipment to listen are no slouches at holding back poor playback.

 

Listen first at the notebook PC. Thanks to good quality USB-DAC, good quality amp, good quality speaker, it sounds good enough. It stretches well both up and down, and there is also a spread of sound that can fill the space of the audition room. As long as you hear it at least this is not a sound that makes you feel particularly dissatisfied. 

Subsequently listening with Nucleus + was no longer a different thing from the moment the first sound came out. It outperforms notebook PC with every element such as grain of one sound, transparency of space, extension of vocal, seduction of bass and volume feeling. 

If you listen on a notebook PC again, it is obviously noisy compared to Nucleus +, the elongation of sound is insufficient, and there is a cramped feeling as if the head was constantly pressed down. On the other hand, Nucleus + has small shadows of noise accompanying when connecting a general PC and audio equipment. Bleeding is reduced from the outline of the sound, and the localization feeling is greatly improved. This is nothing more than a difference beyond imagination. 

[One and a half]

The one major shortcoming with the Nucleus, is that there's the Bridging Ethernet port missing to allow a renderer to be wired directly from the source. With the HDMI, USB, USB-C outputs, the computer needs to be close to the DAC. DACs and the computer source need to have distance from each other, 10m, more if possible, there's the problem. The noise from the power supply for the Nucleus will just throw back to the AC, so the gain in SQ compared to a laptop, will be offset by AC grunge injection. 

 

A renderer like xRendu are already Roon compliant, so a conventional PC server can be used anyway, totally avoiding the Nucleus altogether.

 

At RoonLabs, there's already a discussion on linear power supplies, no wonder.

[One and a half]

7 hours ago, Superdad said:

 

A fair number of people have picked up a JS-2 for their Roon Nucleus units (as our choke-filtered design does not kick anything back into the mains).  Despite the back panel saying 19V, the Nucleus runs great from the 12V/7.2A JS-2–since it is based on an Intel NUC board, and the full specs for all NUCs of the past 3 years give a 12-19V range.  (Everything internally gets stepped way down to 5V, 3.3V, 1.1V anyway.)

The additional 50% ~ on top of the Nucleus for the PSU, plus the cables... and there's SMPS inside the Nucleus. Three wrongs corrected by one right?