Since its introduction in 2015, Roon has made a huge impact in the audio market thanks to its unique combination of great functionality, focus on high-end sound and a metadata library that's in a class of its own. By transforming the way we experience music, and taking a hardware-agnostic approach to the market, Roon is setting the new standard on how audio lovers engage with their music.
As a result of its success, more and more people have been building dedicated servers on which to run Roon, but while devout hobbyists and single-source users may get everything they need by building their own system, many DIY solutions fall short of the expected standard to function in a high-performance environment. Roon therefore decided to introduce two server solutions of their own: Nucleus One and Nucleus Titan.
Roon software can be used on many platforms, including Mac, Windows, and Linux PCs, as well as NAS devices and a variety of media servers. Each of those platforms has its benefits and shortcomings, but none of them achieves a perfect balance between ease of use, raw performance, audiophile design, and the helping hand of a hi-fi retailer.
Based on feedback from audio dealers and custom integrators, Roon designed Nucleus to do just that... provide the best Roon experience in each of these areas.
Roon has enjoyed tremendous success among computer audiophiles and other tech-savvy enthusiasts, but their long-term goal is to reach everyone who loves music. To do that, they created Nucleus, a product which requires nearly no computer knowledge or networking skill. You literally take it home, plug it in, and control it with the Roon Remote app for iPad, iPhone, or Android device (and of course the Roon app for Mac/Windows). Because it's running Roon, Nucleus finds the audio devices on your network and makes it easy to stream to them.
Unlike simple music player apps, Roon is designed to make use of modern computing power (and the more of it the better). So Roon have developed Nucleus One and Nucleus Titan to achieve the best performance possible at two different price points. But with either model, when set up correctly, Nucleus products always feel incredibly fast, and there's horsepower to spare for handling large music libraries, multi-room streaming, and digital signal processing all within a secure and reliable framework.
This thoughtfulness toward reliable use in even the most demanding environments means that, in combination with the servers' lower power consumption and compact form, you really can leave Nucleus on and just forget about it. But more than that, the overall design inside and out also guarantees a true audiophile performance.
Rather than use a desktop or server operating system like Windows, a Linux distribution, or a system-builder tool, Roon realised that a truly bespoke operating system is an area in which they can add real value to their product. Roon OS is an optimised Linux-based operating system developed by Roon Labs to provide the best reliability and performance for what Roon does – networking, storage, and fast database access – and nothing else.
A fundamental benefit of this means that unlike the Roon program you may install onto a laptop, the Roon ROCK OS you may use to build a DIY server, or even the Roon CORE server solutions offered by other manufacturers, Roon have optimised Roon OS specifically for Nucleus.
