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.
 

mwsl

“a dac doesn't need to be roon ready”
@jjss49 nailed it. A dedicated streamer or server like Innuos in almost all instances going to sound better than a Nucleus, Raspberry Pi or mac-mini. What you’ve heard was no fluke, in addition to investing into DAC and server like Innuos; look into installing a ethernet filter, ENO or Muon from Network Acoustics for exemplary streaming experience.

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.  

Thanks for the info everybody. I was actually able to get in touch with the DAC manufacturer, and he said that his DAC is Roon Ready. That said, I understand that as long as the DAC is new’ish, the Nucleus will be able to serve music to the DAC. I’m going over to my friend’s house with my Nuc to confirm. 

@jjss49 What you said about running the Nucleus directly into the DAC would be ill advised got me concerned….as that is exactly what I was thinking about doing. 

Also, I tried an experiment: I moved my nucleus over to my equipment area (unplugging the Nucleus from the cable/modem) and plugged it into the ethernet port on my wi-fi extender. It allowed me to stream music for about 30 seconds before stopping as it seems the bandwidth of info from the extender is not enough for the Nucleus (whereas it is more than enough for my current DAC). Any thoughts about how to solve this? I suppose I could just call the cable company and get them to install another cable outlet near my equipment rack so that I can plug the modem in physically close to my audio equipment. Any other thoughts about this?

I’m aware of ethernet switches, but not exactly sure how I might use them in my circumstance. 

Thanks again everybody….this is really helpful.

What are you using for a roon remote? I had a problem for 3 days where I was trying to control roon using a MacBook Pro after installing roon onto it, I never could get it to work and still to this day I can't. But my iPad and iPhone easily downloaded roon remote and can control it. No one on the roon forum could figure out my problem with the MacBook either, they were helpful but hadn't  any answers. Don't overlook the small stuff.