Is the Roon Nuceus device a good streamer?

I have owned a Roon Nucleus Plus server and give it two thumbs up.  It's really well designed and made and the USB port is "dead quiet", really good sounding box.  It also has the Roon software installed and "automagically" updates itself.  I've never experienced a problem with my Roon server, I suspect you won't either.

Ejr1953
do you also have a streamer?

Roon nucleus includes streamer in its description, but hearing need for a separate streamer.  Very confusing.

You don't "need" a seperate streamer for a Nucleus you can connect it directly to a DAC by USB but you can use a separate streamer if you want. 

I originally set up my system with the Roon core running on my PC and purchased a Bryston BDP-2 (with upgraded audio card) to use as a streamer. I also have a Node2i to compare, and the Bryston sounds a bit better. 

This spring, I built a Roon ROCK core using an Intel NUC in a fanless case so I could put it next to my audio equipment. If you are moderately computer savvy, you can build the equivalent of the Nucleus (same hardware and software) using the NUC in an Akasa Turing fanless case for about half the price of the Nucleus or Nucleus+. I built a fairly high-end config (a bit more powerful than the Nucleus+) for about $1K.  Once built and configured, this offers the same functionality (including auto-updates) as the Nucleus.

For the last couple months, I've been experimenting with connecting my DAC directly to the NUC (Roon ROCK) using USB. The sound quality is virtually identical to the Bryston connected over AES/EBU. 

But there are a lot of variables to consider.

I'm using a ZeroZone linear power supply with my NUC which reduces noise a bit.

I'm using a fairly high-end USB cable (AQ Diamond) and I have not experimented with lower-priced cables. I doubt this has a big impact, particularly with my DAC, but it might have some affect.

My DAC is a Denafrips Terminator which has a very good USB interface. In the case of this DAC, the SPDIF and AES/EBU interfaces are buffered and reclocked by the DAC along with USB, so any clock jitter is determined by the internal clock, not the source clock. So there really isn't any difference in the way the digital data is processed by the DAC. For DACs which derive the sample clock from the SPDIF, Toslink, or AES signal, these interfaces may sound considerably different than USB, depending on the streamer. 

In my experience an Innuos Zenith Mk3 running Roon doesn‘t sound anywhere near as good as running native; the Zenith in Roon beats the Nucleus by a country mile, so: no, the Nucleus is not a top server/streamer