I saw some very old thread about this, but figured its better to start a new one (a lot happens in this field in a couple of years).
Anyway, I am looking for an Roon endpoint with toslink out, to my RME ADI-2 DAC. Even though this DAC has very good jitter handling, its always better to not send to much jitter, so something with a decent internal clock would be good.
So which is the best HAT for RPi for this purpose? Or some other solution that don’t costs to much?
For an RPi + HAT solution, I would at the very least run the HAT part on batteries, and maybe the RPi on a iFi iPower (if the HAT don’t have DC input, I’ll fix it the DIY way).
@Magnus just wondering if you could explain the setup procedure to get Roon to play over toslink on your computer?
I’m using a Macbook pro (early 2013) which has an optical out on the headphone jack, but the problem I’m having is Roon doesn’t recognise that my ADI-2 Pro FS is connected, so I it doesn’t appear as a Roon audio zone option.
I’ve tried setting my Macbook pro’s output to ‘optical’ in system preferences/Sound, and tried playing Roon over that, but there are two problems:
(1) my ADI-2 doesn’t pickup a signal (do I need to configure it somehow?), and
(2) Roon doesn’t give me the option to play DSD over PCM (because it doesn’t realise my ADI-2 is connected). All it gives me is the ability to play PCM at 24bit 96kHz (max), but the signal doesn’t appear on my ADI-2.
How did you manage it? Are you using Windows or Mac?
Welcome @Anthony_Mak. I’m not @Magnus but may be able to help. It’s unlikely Room would recognise your DAC over Toslink as it’s not a bi directional data connection like USB. Once the data leaves the headphone socket your Mac cares not where it’s sending it. The Mac itself would be the endpoint to use. Can you get general Mac sound, e.g. from your browser, to play via the Toslink to DAC connection?
As @killdozer says, devices connected to mini Toslink (S/PDIF) aren’t visible to Roon. This is to be expected.
You’ll need to setup your Mac as the audio device. Make sure you select and enable built-in output in Roon and then enable digital out in your Mac’s sound preferences.
Start testing with 44.1kHz 16bit PCM and no DSP. Share the signal path if you have issues. I’m assuming you are running Roon core on the Mac.
On Windows (which I use), the toslink out has its own audio endpoint, so just select that in Roon and play to it. Then make sure your dac is set to take its input from toslink and it should work.
For me, Roon reported 192khz maximum sample rate for the toslink audio device, and I also had the option to use DoP to play DSD. But not all toslink supports 192khz, and to get DoP for DSD1 you would need 176khz specifically (some motherboard audio supports 192khz but not 176khz).
Not sure how all this works on Mac though, maybe someone else that uses a Mac can help you.
