Hey, this is Drew Baird at Moon Audio and we're here to talk about Roon's
products, the nucleus and nucleus plus. First of all, what is Roon? Roon
essentially is a remote control for your media on your computer network.
Essentially, you load it on to either a computer or an iPad, like we have here. It
will go out to your network and find every possible audio file you have, be
it on a computer, a NAS drive, a server, and it links it all together. On top of
that, the Roon controlling software also can be integrated with Tidal. So
essentially, the albums that you have in your library and the albums that you
have in Tidal are merged together so it looks like one complete library. So let's
say that there are 50 Pink Floyd albums. You have 25 of them, Tidal
may only have ten of them, you may not get all 50 because they haven't been
published yet from licensing agreements, but now you've got them merged together
as if you have 35 albums on your network. It's a great, convenient way to control
your music in that it's almost a Wikipedia for your audio, because not
only does it pull in your file names and folder structures, etc., but it goes out to
the web and it searches for every bit of information on the album that you
have. Your composer, where it was produced, what year it was produced, who was playing in
the band at the time. It is an invaluable tool that I can't live without on my
audio system. So Roon subscription packages come in a couple of different
forms. First, you can get a free 30-day trial from Moon Audio. Now, if you go to
the Roon website you can only get 14 days, but if you go to our website you
can get 30 days with any product that's compatible with Roon that you purchase
with us. They've got a yearly package that's $119, or you can do a lifetime
membership at $499. I can't guarantee that if you do the
lifetime membership, Roon may not be out of business in 20 years, but I can't see
them going anywhere because this software package is so much better than
anybody else's in my opinion. Now you'll see here in front of us the Roon Nucleus
Plus. Now Roon has two devices. They've got the Nucleus and the Nucleus Plus, and
the easiest way to decipher the difference between the two is if you've got a
large library, say a hundred thousand songs, the Nucleus is fine, but if you get
into very large, complex, multiple servers, six terabytes here ten terabytes here -- I
mean, that's a lot of music. You'll want to go with the Plus. Essentially, both the
Nucleus and the Nucleus Plus are computers that have all other startup
features stripped out of it. In other words, there's no anti-virus in here,
there's no Word, there's no Excel. It is designed
specifically to control and deal with the music in your library. So
why wouldn't you use your own computer? Well it's just simply not going to be as
fast as the Nucleus when dealing with very large, complex libraries. When the
processor of the Nucleus does nothing but focus on your library, the ease of
use and how you can scroll back and forth on your iPad to control your
library is going to be so much more effortlessly fast and instant compared to
your computer. As your libraries get very large, your computer's just not going to
be able to handle it because it's dealing with so many other processes
that are going on in the background that you don't need to go on. Now, do you
have to have a Nucleus to enjoy Roon? No, there are plenty of other devices that
support Roon and more and more pop up everyday. We also sell Bryston, for
example, PS Audio. Each one of those are compatible with Roon in different ways.
The PS Audio is the Perfect Wave DAC. It's both the DAC and a network media
hub that you can connect via cat5 connection to your network. It's
controlled by the Roon software on your iPad and you can do exactly the same
thing as the Roon, but it's got a DAC in it. You can also use the Bryston: BDP-3,
BDP-2. These can act as media hubs. They don't have DACs in them, they are just a
distribution system similar to the Nucleus and Nucleus Plus but if you want
to use a device, like I said, that has absolute complete control of just the
library and no other function, then the Nucleus just makes more sense. You'll
see here that we're showing an internal hard drive. Well, in both the Nucleus and
Nucleus Plus not only can you pull music from your network and other computers
and so forth you can actually install your own hard drive.
Here at this point they don't come with their own hard drives, they're
leaving that up to you. As long as you get an internal 2.5 inch
hard drive that doesn't have a height larger than 9.5 you can fit it in there.
At this point I've only seen in a solid-state drive up to a four terabyte
option, very expensive at about 1,600 bucks on Amazon. This is a normal hard
drive, not a solid-state. We're using a 2.5 2-terabyte Seagate. Once you go up
to a 3 terabyte or higher, unfortunately the form factor won't work, so at this
point with this type of hard drive, the less expensive ones, were limited to
about 2 terabytes. Now how do you connect your Roons? The Roon device is connected
via a cat5 connection to your router, it is not wireless. I think there are a
bunch of different after-market, third-party wireless devices that if you
have to use a wireless connection you can buy those and utilize them. I don't
recommend wireless, especially dealing with high-resolution DSD audio that have
high bandwidth. With all the other stuff that's going on in your house and
sharing that network with wireless you can have dropouts. Try and always
integrate with a wired connection. Now with other devices that you can use Roon
on, like your computer or laptop, in these situations the only way to connect is
via USB to a DAC. If you're using a network player similar to the PS Audio
DirectStream DAC or a Roon Nucleus or Nucleus Plus and you've got a cat5
connection, no longer are you tethered to a computer. All you need to do to control
your library is an iPad. So with a USB DAC, if you want to use that as your
endpoint in a Roon architecture, you're gonna have to be tethered to a computer
or a laptop connected via USB and control from there. You really want to
get the computer out of your audio room. It can be a very noisy device and you're
gonna hear in the background when it kicks into overdrive doing things, so
really I recommend something like the Roon Nucleus Plus. How do we connect the
Roon Nucleus Plus? Well, we're gonna take a close-up look at the back panel so we can show you
Okay, so here we are looking at the back panel of the Roon and how we
connect it up to the different devices that we can utilize this product for.
So you'll notice here, first the DC barrel of power supply at 19 volts. Make sure
that you use the power supply that comes with it. We do
plan to look at some linear power supply designs as potential upgrades to this
device later on. You have to be very careful with using linear power supplies
with computer-based products. Most computer based products tend to have a
huge switching demand whereas the power supply just can't handle the loads, so I
would highly recommend potentially contacting us or the vendor that's
designing external power supplies to find out whether it will truly work with
the Nucleus and Nucleus Plus and not damage the internal structure. You'll notice an
HDMI connection. This is for doing high-resolution multi-channel audio
output to an external preamp processor, maybe for your home theater or for other
devices that have HDMI input and can decode Surround Sound, say surround
sound SA. CD or DVD audio, or the other surround formats in the audio realm.
You'll next see the cat5 connection. This is the connection, like I said, that
I recommend for connecting to your network over wireless. Wired is so much
more consistent with less dropouts. In fact, almost no dropouts. I don't think
I've ever had a dropout. If you start to experience dropouts I would look at your
router or your switcher as the issue. You have two USB connections here. This is for
connecting to additional external hard drives or a USB large NAS Drive, as well
as maybe a wireless dongle to connect to your internet. You'll also see a firewire
connection here at the end. This is for future formats that aren't yet available
and potentially maybe to do firmware updates or installers and so forth, so
this is not active at this time. So the next thing we're gonna do now is we're
gonna flip the unit over and we're going to show you how to install an internal hard drive.
Okay, so here we are with the Nucleus turned over and we'll notice
that there's five Phillips head screws that we have to remove, so we're
gonna do that first.
Now it's pretty simple to remove the top plate, just grab on to the little rubber
bumpers. You may have to have a little bit of nails to get in there, and this
opens the internals. So because of the hard drive rail attachments we'll need
to take those out, so we'll unscrew those as there's no way to attach the hard
drive to them without taking them out.
So I went ahead and installed the rails on
the drive already rather than bore you with that process. You'll notice that the
slots are a little elongated. That's because you have to place the hard drive
onto the board and push it into place. Make sure that it locks along its
connectors and then you can go ahead and reinstall the screws to hold the hard drive in place.
So really it's that simple. At this point the only thing left
to do is to put the bottom plate back on. I would note that we've got these
instructions on our website that go into much more simpler details for each one
of the steps so that you can go over and review, as well as a whole host of other
documents that go into greater detail about how to connect the Roon, how to
download the software, how to connect the core of the computer to the Roon Nucleus
and Nucleus Plus, so please visit our website, moon-audio.com and go to the
Roon brand page and check out all the information we have. Thank you and enjoy.