Can a Bluesound Node's Streamer Be Bypassed and be used as an External Dac?

There is an mini optical input on the Node but I've never tried using it and wouldn't hazard a guess about how it works. Suggest you contact Bluesound support directly.

The streamer is much better than the dac, thus you can bypass the dac, commonly done, but not the streamer.

Just wondering,  what DAC are you using?

I have my tv going into the mini optical of the Bluesound node 2i and sending the digital signal through to my Denafrips Ares II dac. If I want to listen to qobuz I just open the app and select something to listen to and the audio switches to music from anything you select whether is radio paradise, qobuz, etc. If I want to switch back to tv all I do is go to the "hamburger button" in the Bluesound menu and select optical input (tv) and it goes to the tv signal and sends it to the dac. Now if my tv is off and I turn it on, the Bluesound will automatically pick up the signal and play tv audio, and if there's music playing with the tv off, it will automatically switch to tv audio. Now this works very well for us as far as switching the digital signal back and forth, but I would also like to think that it would still do the same internally using the Bluesound dac as well. It's really late right now so I hope that I explained this well. Any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.

     Leo 

Also, the best part of this auto switching to tv audio when the tv is turned on is that I don't have to worry about what the node was playing prior when my wife goes to watch tv. It might glitch once in a bluesound moon😜, but it's very rare.