Best network stream other than Google and Airplay

Audio Gear Talk
23

Now I see their manual speaks in gobbley gook…says USB audio input.
But really means exactly as you stated, it’s a USB A for a drive with music content.

Still with it being Roon Tested it could have promise over spdif.

However I would have thought it should work via Chromecast as well which again might support higher resolution.

24

Chromecast can/will be lossless up to 24 bit 48 kHz at least. If Chromecast 88.1/96 kHz is supported, the AVR still may downsample internally. Regardless, if you read Fritz’s posts, he has a tinfoil hat aversion to Google and Microsoft. He does not want to use their products or protocols.

AJ

25

Sure. But use Chromecast as Andrew and Ace suggest. Roon will speak it, your AVR will receive it, and no Google app need be involved. It’s a pretty darn reasonable solution.

Otherwise, you’ll need a Roon Ready setup. You can replace your AVR with one that’s Roon Ready, all of which are listed somewhat inconveniently on the Roon Web site, or you can add another box that’s Roon Ready, like the Zen Stream or a Raspberry Pi running RoPieee, and then a cable from that to your Integra.

26

A RPi running RoPieee (or any other OS) isn’t Roon-ready, but it does support RAAT by running Roon bridge.

27

OK, after a bit of digging into the actual manual for this receiver:

  1. There’s a digital coax input (S/PDIF) that accepts up to 96/24 PCM. A Zen Stream, which Roon recognizes, could drive that as others suggested.
  2. There’s a wired Ethernet input, but it seems (the documentation is a bit unclear) that it is based on UPnP/DLNA. This gadget has been used by some to bridge Roon to UPnP/DLNA, but it seems that is not available for sale because of parts shortages.
  3. AV receivers are really designed for HDMI. There are several Roon server options that provide HDMI output, including multichannel, most notably Roon’s own Nucleus.

If you care only about stereo, I’d just go with #1. The Zen Stream seems good value unless you want to assemble your own from various components and open-source software. If you want multichannel, #3 is your solution, of course more expensive.

I’ve been using Roon from early on, with a lot of different gear, and I really don’t see any alternatives to what I sketched above.

29

That’s right. And it only supports USB output, without a hat. On the whole, I’d go with one of those $200 mini-PC fanless thingys and use the HDMI output to go back into the AVR. But the OP doesn’t want to learn all about this stuff, so probably the Zen Stream is the way to go, as others have said.

31

As others have mentioned, you need a streamer bridge to go from ethernet to Coax SPDIF. And, this is stereo not multichannel, but I have found this one to work tremendously well and is much cheaper than the zen DigiOne Player SPDIF Out

Get the basic version, with DietPi and it should pretty much be plug and play.

32

Unfortunately it’s not available, which is why I did not recommend it. In general, anything Pi-based is really hard to get at the moment because of supply constraints.

1 Like
33

TS seems to have left the building :thinking:

34

Hey @fietser,

No, we’re here, but thank you for the ping and for bringing this thread to our attention so I can move it out of support. There isn’t a support issue in this thread. The customer is asking for gear recommendations and several knowledgeable forum members have shared their thoughts.

37

@jamie TS in my opinion means topic starter. Lots of discussion and no reaction from TS. So my reaction.

1 Like
40

Ah, thank you for that @fietser - behind the scenes we use TS for the tech team, and some customers do as well. Thus my confusion, I appreciate your clarification. :slightly_smiling_face:

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