The Roon Nucleus + is essentially a Roon specific dedicated network streamer costing £2500, but what does it bring to the whole Roon experience sonically? John Scott finds out. 

“Way back in the mists of time – in 1983 to be precise – home computers were all the rage and, jumping on the bandwagon, I bought an Acorn BBC B microcomputer.  The BBC B was the undisputed king of home computers; it has a massive 64 kilobytes of memory, half of which was taken up by the operating system.  Being a music geek, it wasn’t long before I decided that I wanted to put this titanic computing power to use by compiling a database of my 200-odd LPs.  I spent the then not inconsiderable sum of £25 – I could easily have got 5 or 6 LPs for that – on a database programme for the computer and immediately set about planning the structure of my database.  I figured that if I included all the information about all the musicians that played on each album, the producer etc. then I would eventually have a deep insight into my collection.  I’d be able to tell, for example, not only how many Brian Eno albums I had (in fact I already knew this – even I could count to 4 without the aid of a computer) but I’d also be able to call up a list of any other albums he’d been involved in.  Similarly, who knew how many albums I owned that Phil Collins drummed on?  After only a couple of hundred hours of my one-fingered typing I would surely have the answer; perhaps – my imagination was running away with me now – I’d even be able to identify the albums that had both Brian Eno and Phil Collins on them!…”

Read the full review here