Roon Nucleus Titan Upgrade Offer


This morning I got an email from Roon that they were offering substantial trade in values for those of us who have Nucleus servers, to upgrade to their new top-of-the-line Nucleus Titan server.  So I "pulled the trigger" on upgrading from my Nucleus Plus, which sounds great, USB connected to my PS Audio DAC!

ejr1953

I’m having a very hard time understanding the advantages of the Titan vs Nucleus+, is it just faster and a nicer case?

I’m simply interested in sonic performance and if no improvement, then the upcharge to the Titan seems not worth it.

The question you raised is the one I have had, too. For users, apparently, there aren’t any sonic benefits. 

@kennyc and @jmeyers The more I investigated the Titan, the less I was interested in making the change.  Somewhere I read that Roon's agreement with Intel (for the NUC that the Nucleus & Nucleus+ are based on) had ended.  The Roon website seemed to be advertising that the Titan was "faster", which I presume was the normal improvement in processor and memory speeds.  I was struck by how one could reserve a Nucleus but could not purchase a Titan on their website.  I wonder if, when Harman was purchased by Samsung, that the mother company was transitioning all the manufacturing to their factories.  I don't know that for a fact, but thought it was strange that they were offering an upgrade for a product that you could not make a direct purchase for.  My Nucleus+ sounds awesome, so I'll stay with that for now.

With that kind of money, you can build your own fanless PC with better performance, and less electrical interference... I spent $2500 to make a fanless PC with a linear power supply, 16 CPU cores, 32 GB of RAM, SSD storage, and a Femto USB card. My PC will surely outperform any offering from Roon including the Titan. It could play DSD512 files, along with convolution filers, and Parametric EQ... basically, any advanced functionality from Roon can be run.