Roon endpoint or Dac with Room correction

I see didn't know you could do that with Dirac 1. So you can't load the filters to the 2x4HD 

it was a hack using a virtual sound card that wrapped the Dirac filters. That said, it still wouldn’t solve my problem of using a different endpoint/dac.

Minidsp or NAD are about the only products that work with it unless you want a home theater AV.

That’s what I was afraid of. Maybe I’ll continue to use the 2x4HD with Dirac and wait for a potential update to the SHD. Unless you think the current SHD would be a significant upgrade over the Node + 2x4HD

I think the SHD not the Studio would be an upgrade how significant I can't say. I know what the manual says but I ran Dirac 2 on a Windows 8 laptop even though it says it only runs on Windows 10. The Studio so I assume the full SHD will as well works as a Roon endpoint though it isn't certified. I never had a problem with it. The SHD can be used as a preamp as well. 

I’ve used ARC and Dirac both (as well as several other methods of auto and manual room EQ). They both give great results. I have two different systems doing what you want.

1. MiniDSP SHD. This is in our living room, a third system for us. I find the SHD’s interface a little clunky, but it is a very good quality unit at a reasonable price, and it has everything you asked for.

2. Auralic Aries G1 to Anthem STR Preamp. A far more polished interface than the SHD, but more expensive, as there is no streamer in the STR, and the STR is more costly than the SHD. One could replace the Aries with an RPi streamer and accomplish the same thing. The Anthem has -- in addition to ARC -- bass, treble, balance, and sub level controls, very useful in my opinion. They are transparent and a great way to touch up quickly the sound of problematic recordings.

Note that the Auralic Aries G1 is a certified Roon endpoint and has its own manual DSP (20 bands, I think). It upsamples to do its DSP and to my ears, is quite transparent. So if you wanted to do manual room EQ (I don’t recommend it), all you’d need is the Auralic and any DAC.

DSP has improved enormously in recent years. I find the newer systems transparent and without the hardness older systems could induce.

Roon has a room correction endpoint, but it's clunky and not that advanced IMHO as Dirac.

What Roon lets you do is upload convolution files and use them to correct the speaker response and phase. This requires you to do the measurement, acquisition and configuration. It is also VERY heavy on processing power that's required.

Instead of this approach, I judiciously applied a few parametric corrections which is much easier to do for me, and a lot easier on the Roon server CPU.

You can read about this approach and how it worked for me here:

https://speakermakersjourney.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-snr-1-room-response-and-roon.html

The reason I say Roon is not as advanced is that Dirac does a lot of processing of the signal to hear closer to how we perceive sound, and averaged so that the benefits are spread out over a listening area.  What I mean is, our ear/brain averages the speaker/room response over time. What we perceive as elevated or suppressed may be very different than how a microphone hears the room. You can read a lot more from Floyd Toole, but as I understand it, the Roon convolution is a single snapshot which uses 1 location and pretends the microphone is the only source of truth.

The thing I want to let you know, is that most experts, and I (definitely not an expert) agree that we can't hear phase changes very much, so adjusting for perfect phase may be more bother than it is worth, so the approach I took may be most of the benefit for only a little work.  It took very little time, uses very little CPU power and has left me with subtle improvements.