Roon’s music servers are great, but quite expensive so far. The new Nucleus One server could bring the company’s smart music technology to a whole new audience. The new product is the most affordable Roon server on the market, with a price tag less than a third of previous models.
However, a lower price doesn’t mean you should lower your expectations. Roon says the Nucleus one is “comparable in performance to the previous Nucleus”, with rock-solid reliability and high performance.
According to Roon founder Enno Vandermeer, the goal has always been to make Roon available to as many people as possible. Since the Sooloos system almost two decades ago, “we’ve been on a mission ever since to develop something we could recommend to our friends and families.” According to Vandermeer, the Nucleus one is “a dedicated Roon server for the price of a turnkey mini PC”.
If you’re not familiar with Roon, it’s part of the Harmann audio family, which also includes AKG, JBL and Mark Levinson. Roon’s music servers are designed to provide a useful, unified, and multi-room compatible front end for your music library to create “a surfable, searchable digital magazine spanning your entire music collection.” It works not only with locally stored music, but also with the best music streaming services like Tidal, Qobuz and KKBOX, all within the same interface for a consistent experience.
Roon Nucleus One: price and specifications
The new Roon Nucleus One is molded from polycarbonate and designed to mirror the premium Nucleus Titan server. The 2.5-inch drive tray allows you to add SATA storage up to 8TB via SSDs or hard drives.
It also supports USB drives via the Type A connector with speeds up to USB 3.0, and there’s an Ethernet connector for network devices and HDMI for stereo and multi-channel audio output. The Linux-based Roon OS software can handle up to 10,000 albums or 100,000 songs in a single library and can send audio to up to six different multi-room audio zones. There’s a quiet internal fan to keep everything cool and it’s all controllable via the Roon app for Android or iOS.
The Roon Nucleus One has a US price of $499 and will go on sale on May 15, 2024.