Bart and Jacques, thank you very much for your in depth review and praise for the MU1. I am happy you enjoyed the demo at Listening Matters so much!
Jacques, I like to respond to a few remarks you made on the MU1 design. Please feel free to ask me for more details whenever aspects of the MU1 are unclear, on this forum or offline.
First of all, the MU1 is perfectly capable of running the DSP features of Roon. I must say I was underwhelmed by for instance the quality of the room correction, but the MU1 has no problem running it. The MU1 is also tested with very large music libraries and has no trouble supporting them. The only thing we recommend is to let it run overnight for indexing because in general Roon is not very responsive during that process. There are some options in Roon to ‘throttle’ the index process, which helps a bit, but still it’s better to just let it run overnight imo.
Furthermore the NUC in the MU1 is well passively cooled on the chassis, and it is the very latest NUC model. It has no problem serving many end points simultaneously, and a few customers are indeed using it as the Roon server for their full home. Of course a full blown PC with fan cooling will offer higher performance, but it will usually be overkill for audio playback, even at high res - and you don’t want such a noisy device in your living room. In fact the whole idea for the MU1 was born when small passively cooled PC’s were getting powerfull enough to run this task.
Remote controls are in the make. Indeed there will be an infrared interface option, but before that the MU1 will get its own web page to set preferences (also those of a connected LS1) via a browser. This will facilitate source selection and volume control as well, and integration with 3rd party home automation systems. Volume and source control from an iOS device lock screen is on the wish list.
The decision to not display cover art on the screen is entirely mine. I just happen to find it ugly :-) In my world the tablet is for interfacing with the catalog, the device is for rapid access to key features like volume control, mute and source selection and a quick view of what’s playing. USB DACs are supported, but in that case you just bought a very expensive NUC cabinet. There’s no limit to using them though.
A MU1 without Roon Core would not cost half of the price I’m afraid. Our aim was to limit the amount of boxes in the system, to increase elegancy. We were the last company that was allowed to offer a combined Roon Core/End Point without large hdmi display interface and I’m glad for it.
Jacques, I’d love to learn why you feel as if the user interface of the MU1 is ‘an afterthought’. I admit that it is still in development, but in our plans it formed the center piece from the beginning. There’s a few UI features on the way still this year that no other manufacturer offer and that will truly change the way you can interact with your music. The MU1 OS is built from the ground up based on a Linux ‘Tiny OS’ system, to give us full control on everything that’s going on inside. Admittedly, this means development takes more time, but we are in this for the long run. In our next update we offer a radically rewritten ‘internal control program’ that brings ultimate stability (we adopted a special programming style with much less dependencies). Our cooperation with Roon Labs is becoming more tight, with the mutual intention to make it a true flagship Roon product.
Again, thank you Bart and Jacques for your enthusiasm about the MU1’s sonic performance. We intend to bring the user experience of the MU1 to the same level as the sound quality. Feedback like yours is well appreciated and we will continue improving it.
All the best,
Eelco Grimm
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