Nuclues plus bricked

Have you tried to reboot?

Yes several times, pulled it out of rack and plugged into monitor. No output on either hdmi port.

I hate to break it you, Nucleus or plus is a piece of junk. Roon focuses on software not hardware. Lots of folks in my circle have dumped nucleus for another solution to run Roon Core.

Tbh my main reason for purchasing it was for stability, previously I was running roon core on my Nas and secondly as it's one of the few streamers that support multi channel audio.

I was wondering if nuclues was a misspelling or a new word. I guess I know now.

Misspelling, couldn't edit the typo in the title

Call Andrew at Small Green Computer.  He can help with a rock solid replacement and offers great support.  

Can you elaborate on why the Small Green Computer is better?

I cant from a technical / hardware perspective.  From experience, it allowed me to load all my music on dedicated SSD, stopped all the interrupts I was experiencing using my laptop as my Roon core and did not break the bank.  Andrew Gillis, owner of SMG, provides excellent support and focuses on dedicated music servers.  There are many excellent solutions (and growing as streaming moves to mass market).  SGM has been in the home music server business as long as anyone.  

Join the club. I bricked two.  Moved on to Innuos Zenith MK3 and never looked back.  

I have Roon but not Nucleus. I find that making my own server and streamer out of Linux compatible mini computers has been very cost effective and I’ve never had this sort of failure after an upgrade.

Of course, there are other challenges, like keeping the OS up to date, and I’ve had to reboot my streamer a few times to get it to handshake with my DAC, but having 100% control over the hardware and the OS makes me feel less anxious and has saved me a lot of money. I know that my technical background serves me well here and that many may not be able to do the same, but if you are at all technically curious I do encourage this approach.

SGM or SMG? Gillis never responded to me. Sent it back.

Roon sounds like one thing I am glad I never got hooked on.

Newest update locked up my nucleus +. Unplugged it for  30 minutes and it then finished the update. All fine now.

Only trouble I’ve had with it.

When Roon works its great, when it does an update and gets hung up for an hour regardless of you rebooting, resetting network and all the other "tips" Roon suggests its infuriating. It never seems to be totally stable- I've had it for three years and want to pull my hair out with it about 4-6 times a year- every year. Their technical support and forums are also relatively unhelpful and blame everything on your network, never on their systems.

@monkeyade don't bother answering roxy. This person is a "drive-by commenter with nothing to add. I'm pretty sure they're just trying to get the high score, lol 😉🤪😍

The innous is a very good solution ,you can get from 2-4 T of SS drive 

Many like their interface and don’t use Roon , but like myself used to it 

and on the back end It has HQ player built in if you have a big HD and fast processor , I am just getting into it  you can literally Taylor your sound to your taste 

thstbeungsaid you still need a good dac, I still am saving to buy the Excellent       T+A 200 dac which has HQ player and several dithers and adjustments built in .

I know 7 people that have bought this dac .. I still stand by at $7k a no 🧠 er

and even at 2x that I have found nothing this well balanced ,and I have heard 

a bunch against it at several audio shoot outs in comparisons like chord Dave ,Mola Mola ,Lampizator all much more $$ 

@monkeyade, I’ve had a Nucleus since early on in the pandemic. Remember when you couldn’t go anywhere or do anything for two years straight? Fun huh? I bought it mostly for its plug and play functionality and convenience because now I focus more on the music than the technology of the thing. Roon automatically updates all of my mobiles and laptops while I’m sleeping, and I don’t have to physically store a large library of music that’s more easily accessed using Al Gore’s greatest invention.

But what is better than thought is that I go to most anywhere and be able to listen to what I was enjoying twenty some hours in the past, after flying overnight to Amsterdam. In my home setup I did have to put it on its own shelf and use a better LPSU though. I like the software. And as long as you only use it as a pass through and never use DSP, or any of kind of filters, or equalization, it works well. Putting a passive Ethernet filter with a good Ethernet cable before the Nucleus did improve the sound quality quite noticeably. 

Small Green Computer, SGC.

https://www.smallgreencomputer.com/

Andrew Gillis is the best. Very good and prompt support. Usually responds within a day.

@adasdad tbh overall I like roon and don't use the dsp functions either.

i went from roon core on a windows pc to roon core on a nas to the nucleus plus. One of the primary reasons why i went with the nucleus was the mutichannel output over hdmi, which i occasionally use in my movie room. That said for some reason on the odd occasion I want to use multichannel, nothing comes out of the hdmi and required reboots. A pain as that requires pulling the rack out of the cupboard etc.

Since it's now been unplugged for a day I'll retry it but don't have high hopes. Looks like it will need to go back to roon for a fix.

@monkeyade, I also like Roon because it lets us play music on any device or through the speakers in the different rooms we have in our condo all at once so everybody is happy. My audio gear dealer of choice for almost 50yrs, puts together systems in McMansions’s that have multiple $100K setups where Roon’s ability to easily play music anywhere is a must have convenience. There’s gotta be something simple in the way that you’ve got things connected that is causing the issues that your having I believe. So when I’m experiencing any technical problems I don’t go to the internet, I just call his store and ask how I can resolve it. Much easier than asking a question on Audiogon. Also the folks at Moon Audio out east, and Upscale Audio on the left coast, love to talk audio tech stuff and are ready to help if you give them a call. 

My nucleus plus has died twice. First time they replaced the motherboard, second time they replaced everything except the chassis. Even with entirely new innards, they would only give it a 90 day warranty which indicates how much confidence they have in their hardware. Piece of junk. Waiting for it to die one more time and I will go to small green computer.

Ironically, it just started cutting out as I wrote the above passage.

To be honest I'm more than annoyed right now, it's been over a week since the case was acknowledged by Roon technical support and still nothing from them.

Roon & Nucleus flawed

Thank The Lord for Innuos Sense

tcutter-

I've interacted with Roon the company re: warranty support and service.

When it works I can't argue it's a great product 

BUT their support model is terrible and as a company they are far from customer friendly 

Both reasons after 5 yrs of use I dumped them and moved on

No going to lie, if I end up replacing the 2.6K brick I'll be dropping Roon subscription as well.

That's what I did

I had issues with my Nucleus + that clearly were an issue with their OS and Nucleus.

I try and be a fair and reasonable person. I'm not looking to get away with anything.

Their response and position on the issue was deplorable.

I barely came away with "we're sorry sir"

This came after months of try

That's what I did

I had issues with my Nucleus + that clearly were an issue with their OS and Nucleus.

I try and be a fair and reasonable person. I'm not looking to get away with anything.

Their response and position on the issue was deplorable.

I barely came away with "we're sorry sir"

This came after months of trying to work with their atrocious support model (post your problem and keep fingers crossed that someone responds in under 10 days)

After being left with a product that wouldn't work for me & a company they could care less I bought an Innuos Pulsar and with the Sense App I've never looked back. It's wonderful

I'll say again...if Room works for you and has no issues then it's a great product. If it doesn't then good luck

I’m just glad I did not get sucked into their lifetime subscription.

Why doesn't roon offer a phone support number?

I found the file manager system horrifying to deal with. I'm also trying to integrate  a desktop PC with a nucleus to access music files, it was extremely convoluted complicated, and not able to figure it out.

It just doesn't work very well for file manager issues and net work access to another computer,  and guidance is especially poor and very complicated.

I like the software, but Interface for file manager system has to be improved

Roon and SGC, Andrew Gillis +++.  Great support.  

I think the better option for ROON is to use a cheap computer in another room, away from your stereo. Then use fibre optic streaming to eliminate the noise that would be picked up getting the bits from the other room into your DAC. Using Fibre with a PC computer is the key to even the score of not buying an expensive Music Server next to your audio gear.

I have a $300 DELL PC computer hidden behind a door in a faraway room. It is running ROON Core. It automatically goes to sleep at 2:30AM so that I also have to go to sleep. It wakes up at 7:00AM ready for another day of music.

All of this using Windows 10 or 11. I forgot since I do not have a mouse, keyboard, or monitor hooked up to it. I hardly ever look at the OS. I used RDP to first setup the settings I wanted for the OS and to install ROON Core, I cannot recall the last time I had to look at the OS.

Only caveat to using the PC far from the audio system is to use the ROON Core on the direct Ethernet side of your home network. That is if you use PowerLine adapters as I also do (for multiple rooms), then have the PC on the Ethernet and not on the PowerLine side. This is if you want to stream Hi-res.

I discovered an issue streaming the hi-res version of George Harrison’s ALL THINGS MUST PASS. There is a song where he starts whistling. The stream would always break at that spot when I used to have the PC on the PowerLine side of the network (lower capacity side). Move it to the higher capacity side and the whistling part works perfectly all the time.

I run my core on a NUC (Intel mini computer). I have the Innuos and with others reporting good luck running the core on the innuos, maybe I should try it. I’ve just agreed with the roon recommendation that the core should be on a stand alone device.

the latest update seemed to cause occasional hesistation between songs but that is all. I think they will come out with another update soon.

good luck,

Jerry

@yyzsantabarbara So the core has to be on the same network as the streamer.  It has been my experience that it has to be on the same switch.  I tried moving my core away from my system (to the router location) and the streamer and core couldn't find each other.  

I blamed this on the switch that I have at the system location.  the switch services my streamer, AV system, TV set and regenerator (which has internet port to talk to mother ship). 

Jerry

@carlsbad2 My observation was when I had the Core on the slow side of my hybrid network, Ethernet + PowerLine adapters. Things worked fine for a long time even when I had the Core on the PowerLine side of the network. For example, I have ROON endpoints in my office, 2 bedrooms, family room, Livingroom, and garage. I had the Core in one of the bedrooms with a PowerLine connection to the network.

That worked fine until that George Harrison hi-res song. I was surprised that the stream would always stop at the start of the whistling. However, I was happy I had a reproducible event. After some testing I realized that putting the Core with a direct Ethernet connection to my Router which also has a switch attached to it solved the issue.

My router is in my office and I do not want any computer making noise in this audio centric room so I repurposed an old cable TV connection in the wall separating my office from a bedroom. I snaked an Ethernet cable to the bedroom from the office. This gave me a direct connection to the higher bandwidth of my network. After this the Core worked with all types of material.

My PowerLine gear is fairly old so maybe the new ones are better.

In my situation the Core today is on the Ethernet side and works with both the Ethernet side and PoweLine side.

The Nucleus is a pretty cheap and not particularly high quality computer. For the price of a Nucleus Plus you can build a quiet Windows machine with a much better power supply and space for more storage, quality network and usb cards etc. Regarding the OP, I think possibly Roon did something strange with the last update. It's the first time I've had an issue with Roon's stability.

Figured I'd give an update on this.

So, I have to send it back to Roon and at the moment it looks like it will be free of charge. which is good news.

I have had two Nucleus Plus machines stop connecting to my LAN.

I am three+ years into owning a Nucleus. It worked sometimes. But software upgrades always would through it offline. I have worked with Roon support and my dealer. It was always a pain.

Instead, I started running Roon Core on a Windows PC. It has been very stable for two weeks so far, and I am using it on several wireless devices. Roon is also working with my NAD receiver/Endpoint.

Roon ARC is also working now, for the first time! So fun and useful.

And, I purchased a Wiim Pro to stream Qobuz via Roon to my main hifi. (It arrives on Sunday). I am expecting good things.

Can’t wait to sell my Nucleus Plus. One of the least enjoyable products I have ever owned. Good riddance, I say. :-)

@panamintsteve, I’m sorry to hear about your negative experiences with your Nucleus+ units. I’ve had my Roon Nucleus Rev B for about three years or so since the beginning of the pandemic, and I’ve never had an issue. The Intel chip in the Nucleus is simple and essentially fool proof, so I can’t understand what could possibly go awry. Then again I don’t use mine for anything except picking music from Qobuz. 

Just a quick update on this, I have received the nucleus back about a week ago and all is working well again. Looks like they had to replace the motherboard from what I can tell.