In Barn for Review: Roon Nucleus+

I have a thing for industrial design. Here, let me show you…

On the left is the LaCie Limited Edition Blade Runner Desktop Hard Drive, designed by Philippe Starck. I bought this moments after I first laid eyes on it because I was looking for an external USB hard drive and this one was clearly Starckly lovely. The Blade Runner cost more than an average, crappy looking 4TB USB drive, but I was more than willing to pony up the extra dough and we’ve lived happily ever after since. On the right is the Roon Labs Nucleus+ and, like the Blade Runner, it is lovely and costs more than other Roon Core server solutions that look crappy.

Here’s what Roon says about the ideal platform for running Roon Core: Roon is designed to take advantage of a high-speed dual-core CPU, fast RAM, and a fast SSD. Guess what? The Nucleus, which is based on the Intel NUC, has a dual-core CPU, fast RAM, and a fast SSD.

As you can surmise from its heatsink wrapped chassis, the Nucleus don’t need no stinkin’ fan.

I’ve wanted to type this for years so here it goes — the above picture shows the Nucleus’ inputs.

Even the box is pretty.

Features

Fanless
2 USB ports for USB audio devices or external storage devices
2 HDMI audio outputs for connecting to your AVRs
Ethernet port for networking, for easy zero setup networking
Updates for firmware are integrated into the Roon App
Includes 1 year Roon subscription

Capabilities

Over 10,000 albums (100,000 tracks)
Over 6 simultaneous zones
All combinations of DSP are available

Price: starts at $2,559.00

Company Website: Roon Labs