Roon Nucleus as a Streamer

 I have a Roon Nucleus and have utilized it as a server/streamer. In my opinion, it was decent, very enjoyable, but not great.  Together with an Sbooster LPS in place of the stock power supply and a decent USB cable (in my case Curious), I thought it was somewhat better (say a smidge better) than a Node 2i hooked up via coax to the same Chord Qutest DAC.  Then in March of this year put a Bricasti M5 in play as my network player and Roon enpoint via Coax to the Qutest, and this took things to a whole other level. 

I agree with lalitk. There is no need to purchase a separate server if you already own a Windows or Apple computer. I used a ten year old MacAir, on which I installed Roon Core. The resulting digital signal can be conveyed to a Roon-ready DAC (in this case PS Audio) via WIFI or USB. The sound is great, and is indistinguishable from that produced by a Roon nucleus, or any other server that has a CPU powerful enough to run Roon software.

Roon themselves recommend keeping the Roon core away from the Hi-Fi and not connecting it directly to the DAC. I am not sure why they would recommend this unless they had done trials to determine it as the optimum method. I would therefore accept their recommendation as being correct.

Last month I bought an inexpensive Intel Nuc to use as a Roon core.

If house layout was different, I would have used my MacBook.

If you already own a general purpose computer that you could use for Roon, you might want to try that first before buying a dedicated server or streamer.  This will give you a change to familiarize yourself with Roon before making any upgrade decisions.

What is behind recommendations to use a Nucleus only as a server, not with a direct connection?  A couple of possibilities:

First, some users like to locate the music server separately from the endpoint(s).  This may be a bias held over from the days when computing devices tended to have noisy fans.  I have both a Mac Mini and a sonicTransporter music server in the same cabinet with my preamp and power amp.  I don't notice any fan noise.  Nor does electrical noise seem to be a problem, as far as I can tell. 

Second, some users don't like USB connections for music.  I've had problems with USB in the past, but this had to do with maintaining the handshake between certain devices, not with sound quality. 

The main reason I don't use a direct USB connection from the sonicTransporter is because I allocate the one USB-B port on my streamer/preamp/DAC to the Mac Mini, which hosts digital signal processing applications (BACCH4Mac and HQPlayer) as well as music-management applications.  So I only use ethernet to connect the music server to the streamer/preamp/DAC.  

Personally, I think the Nucleus is a little overpriced and under-powered. For some people it's a good choice, but I decided the sonicTransporter was just about as simple, a bit cheaper, more powerful, and well supported.  Many people consider an inexpensive NUC even more cost-effective.  But it can depend on what you want to run and what configurations you prefer, which you may not know yet.

One set up I sometimes use, which works well, is to  run HQ Player on the sonicTransporter and feed that directly to the streamer/preamp/DAC via a direct USB connection. I go back and forth between preferring that vs. running BAACH4Mac on the Mac Mini.