Can my Roon Nucleus be used with a non-Roon-ready DAC?
I have questions that are due to my limited knowledge, so I am turning to this wise crowd for the answers.
I own a Roon Nucleus that lives in a closet with my cable/modem and is attached directly to the Nucleus via an ethernet cable.
My audio system is about 35 feet away. It consists of an integrated tube amp, DAC/Streamer and a power conditioner (and speakers, of course). The DAC/Streamer is connected via an ethernet cable to a wi-fi extender (so that I don’t have to run 35 feet of cable from the modem to the DAC; not to mention, the WAF would be zero for that solution).
A friend recently brought over his DAC with an Innuous server. I LOVED his DAC!! It brought just the qualities to my system that I was looking for. But, his DAC is not Roon ready. This led me to several questions which I’m hoping you can answer:
1) Is it possible to make a non-Roon-ready DAC work with Roon?
2) If I were to get an ethernet switch, could I connect the switch to the wi-fi extender, and then to my Roon Nucleus? If so, would the Nucleus be able to act as a server for the DAC?
3) Assuming that the (nameless) DAC is at or above the quality level of the Innuous server, to what degree might the Innuous be contributing to the quality sound I was hearing?
I am purposely being vague about both my specific equipment and my friend’s DAC as I am asking these questions for general purposes, not to get feedback on my equipment vs my friend’s.
Any help you can offer will be appreciated.
I’m not sure about that, jjss49. The roon nucleus is a streamer. You connect it to a streamerless DAC that is roon ready and the DAC will play whatever the nucleus streams to it. I do this myself with an Esoteric SACD player that has no streaming capabilities. I think that there are DACs that are not roon ready that will accept a stream from the nucleus but I can’t swear to it. I’d look around the roon website and forums for an answer to this.
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There is no such thing as Roon ready dac. Nucleus has hdmi, usb and ethernet ports. HDMI for use in system with non-usb dac, usb for ANY usb ported dac. Generally speaking, dac is more important than server to final sound quality, not to say Innuous wasn't contributing to sq. Still, Nucleus is pretty nice server, I'd not be thinking it weak link in chain. |
“a dac doesn't need to be roon ready” |
while it will work, running a dac directly out of the usb port of the roon nucleus is not advised if sound quality is a priority (if it isn't, one must ask why pursue all this roon stuff anyways, right?) there is a whole industry segment on upgraded switches, network isolation/filters, usb cleansers, optical conversion modules and so on - purpose of which is to isolate the computing/data management aspect of roon (which produces substantial electrical 'grunge') from the delivery of the streamed audio signal to the dac/renderer pulling the audio signal straight out of the nucleus (or other core machine) is the noisiest, least desirable way of listening to a system using roon - same reason why non-roon based streaming from an everyday non-dedicated pc is ill advised if for background, ambient, non critical music, then yes, fine, but it is the worst way to get good sound from a roon-based setup |
I'll repeat what I said above in a different way: You can't tell the roon to just send a signal and you'll have a device there to recieve it. Roon has to see your device before it will send a signal. it will see any device that doesn't require a driver to be installed (basicly anyting less than 10 years old). but you have to open Roon and "Select audio device" that you want roon to send digital data to. If roon doesn't see your device, you're out of luck. |
