Roon Labs Nucleus and Nucleus Plus music servers fuse industry-leading streaming know-how with some of the most powerful and clever hardware there is.
Roon Labs: a name you may not have heard of until now; chances are, however, you have already used products they’ve designed. Taking their massive industry expertise in streaming audio, Roon Labs have entered the hardware market with their powerful and impressive Roon Labs Nucleus and Nucleus Plus music servers.
Join us, as we get the lowdown on two of the most powerful music servers currently available…
Roon Labs
Roon Labs was founded in January 2015 by an established team of industry experts, who “had form” for working on various audio projects, up to a decade previously. Their first product, under the Sooloos company banner, was an embedded multi-room music server system with storage, audio playback, and touchscreen kiosk devices.
When launched in 2006, Sooloos received critical acclaim and became the gold standard in high-end audio systems; this led to their subsequent acquisition by none other than Meridian Audio in late 2008. The same team developed (among other things) a desktop music player for HP that has shipped on over 50 million PCs since its introduction.
After leaving Meridian at the beginning of 2015, the team set about developing a world-class music experience in software. Roon launched as a desktop music app in May 2015 to critical acclaim and is now supported by over 50 respected audio equipment manufacturers for streaming, storage and USB playback.
Off the back of this success, Roon Labs decided to turn their expertise towards a dedicated, high-end hardware-based music server. The fruits of their labours, the Roon Labs Nucleus and Nucleus Plus have just been launched to the audio fraternity amid much interest.
Roon Labs Nucleus
So, what is the Roon Labs Nucleus?
Nucleus is the centre of your Roon music system. It’s the housekeeper, the traffic cop, and the brain that takes care of the music in your life. Using Nucleus, Roon manages all your music – on hard drives, NAS, and streaming content – and allows you to play it on all the audio devices around your home. Nucleus is the best way to run Roon, at any price.
Well, that’s how Roon Labs describe the Nucleus, anyway. Looking past the marketing for a moment, we can view the Roon labs Nucleus as a dedicated music computer, with tremendous storage and processing power. The Nucleus and Nucleus Plus are both based on Intel’s NUC (Next Unit of Computing) computer platform.
There are clear advantages of using the Intel NUC platform; the Roon Labs Nucleus, for example, features no fans (the large heatsinks are sufficient to cool the device). The Nucleus also offers tremendous processing power in a compact package, ideal for the level of DSP processing the Roon software permits.
For those who require even beefier levels of DSP processing, those running extensive multi-room networks for example, there’s the Roon Nucleus Plus. The Nucleus Plus substitutes the core i3 processor of the Nucleus for a core i7 processor, allowing even greater DSP processing for really demanding applications and users.
Using the Nucleus
Using the Roon Nucleus is easy; simply plug Nucleus into your network, connect your hard drives, download Roon remote apps (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows) and you’re ready to play music. A wide array of industry partners mean you can connect to a wide variety of audio devices, including AirPlay, Sonos, Roon Ready, Devialet, KEF, Meridian, Squeezebox, and a huge variety of USB DACs.
The Roon software itself is a multi-room, multi-user networked audio platform built to perform to audiophiles’ standards. Enjoy bit-perfect playback, DSD and PCM upsampling, multichannel playback, and signal path display.
Nucleus offers the perfect, transparent server to accompany your USB DAC, and offers a perfect foundation upon which to build your digital music network. If you’re looking to upgrade your music server, or to make a serious step towards audiophile streaming, then the Roon Labs Nucleus and Nucleus Plus music servers are worthy of close investigation.