Wow, exhaustive. I’m running Roon on a Mac Studio, to an Audiobyte Hydra USB interface, a Musical Fidelity DAC, then on to powered monitors. I’ve been learnning more and more about the infinite variables available to us, from your results it sounds like I can run this system without a passive volume control or preamp in the system, but that I can attenuate volume via Roon DSP. That’s kind of incredible!
I wish there was a way to similarly attenuate all audio sourcing from the Mac (Apple Music, streaming, etc) in the same way, or even to run it through Roon MUSE so I could achieve same kind of bit perfect fidelity.
Volumen control by roon is pefect
You do not need a preamp if you like
Just a good rca or XLR swicht box to coose the input to your Power amps
There is serious study publish here demonstrating that there is not any loss with Roon digital volumen control
Or an on-ramp into Roon for other external sources. Really surprised more people are not doing this. Would be great for Roon to officially support this functionality.
Rib , please , could you explain what it is , on ramp other sources….?
An “on ramp” allows digital signals, external from roon to be broadcast as a radio station within Roons live radio. Of course, you can digitize any analog feed so that can be broadcast as well. It is a touch clunky, but you can get hi res bit perfect/lossless playback. This is sort of a hack, but it also illustrates a very clear path to being able to onboard external sources into roon. An official feature supporting this, with even hardware partners creating adcs and onramps that are certified would be amazing. Roon can really become a full functioning preamplifier.
There are numerous ways to achieve this, but the most straightforward I am aware of is rooextend.
I’m guessing something similar to this.
But build directly into Roon’s UI so that you can select different sources as inputs, either physical ones like a turntable, or software based ones like AirPlay.
Effectively turning Roon into a preamp.
Building an AirPlay ‘input’ directly into Roon would allow you to stream things like Podcasts, MixCloud and content from other 3rd party audio apps like BBC Sounds to Roon via Airplay, allowing you to take advantage of it’s DSP and multi room features.
Likewise Roon could (should they want to) support USB analog to digital (ADC) interfaces connected to a Roon server as a ‘input’ source. Taking it one stage further, they could even extend their RAAT protocol to be two-way and allow networked endpoint to act as an ADC input device.
Thanks a lot for your explanations