Roon Nucleus Plus Review • A bridge to the world of music

Many of us have recently noticed the “Roon Ready” on the packaging of a new device we bought. Almost the entire audio industry, from Trinnov to Metrum, has made their devices “Roon Ready”.

But what is Roon? It is a software, an application, whose mission is to organize and manage the available music that we have in our file format. Roon is not a music service like Tidal, Qobuz or Spotify, but a platform that locates our music files stored on all our network devices and displays their movies on the screen of a tablet, laptop or smartphone like Netflix .

But it does not stop there, Roon is compatible with Tidal and Qobuz, with the result that – if we subscribe to these services – it integrates these global libraries with our own. There is no easier way to search and find a track from Roon. It is designed for high-end situations as it supports from DSD to MQA.

Our Roon compatible device will be presented with its name in the application as available and by touching the screen it will start playing our selection or playlist. Roon can “see” many compatible devices and therefore many hearing systems, it is multiroom, ie it can play the same track on all devices or different tracks on different devices (systems).

At the same time it provides detailed information for each album, a kind of record critique, to suggest similar recordings and to deepen us more in the world of music. Of course, the Roon application is not free, although there are offers for a month or more of use with the purchase of a “Roon Ready” device.

The subscription costs $ 119 a year or $ 499 for a lifetime, most people choose the latter because once you use it, you get stuck. In addition to the Roon application, Roon Labs (so called) also manufactures two devices that act as servers.

These are the Nucleus and Nucleus Plus models that are essentially sophisticated platforms for storing and distributing our music. They connect to our stereo only digitally via USB (DAC), they are silent and faithful to our commands.

They also have HDMI output for our AV amplifier as they also support multi-channel track. In addition, Nucleus can be connected to a network DAC or network amplifier. As it is understood, the connection possibilities are many. We had the opportunity to try Nucleus Plus, one of the first to arrive in Greece.

We used Nagra HD HD DAC X which is compatible with Roon as DAC. From the first moment one understands that Nucleus Plus does not put any audio signature in the system, it just serves music seamlessly and nothing else. It does not affect or change the sound of our system at all.

It is a server with the ability to accept our music from stickers, hard drives (HDD or SSD) or from NAS, recognizes all kinds of file formats and disk formats. As a control center we used an iOS tablet, ie an iPad, where all the albums were now wirelessly available at our fingertips for playback.

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Roon, headquartered, has world recorded music in a large database with a wealth of data and information for each track. As we add a new song, the system will recognize it, sort it and update our playlist with our available music. Never has music been so rich in information and so ready to listen to.

Roon has now become the music control center of every audiophile and most users are fans of classical music. Try it.