Bluesound with Roon, RCA and optical out

Audio Gear Talk BluOS: NAD & Bluesound
1

Roon Core on old MacBook as the brain and running 24/7. Running wired to my switch

I just bought the Bluesound Node and attach the RCA and optical out to my stereo. Do I have to set it up different for playing Tidal MQA and playing Qobuz FLAC?

Analog RCA uses the Node’s DAC and the digital cables bypass node’s internal DAC.

Does it make any different playing music from Roon to Node thru RCA and then from Roon to Node thru digital?

I guess I want to set up tidal with MQA decoder and rendered but then use Qobuz FLAC without MQA.

Is this possible???

Thanks!!!

2

Hi,
You don’t need to have the RCA and optical cables outputting. If you have a separate DAC, just the optical is needed. Otherwise just use the RCA cablle output. The Bluesound Node will run both Qobuz and Tidal either way. The difference between using the Node DAC and your own DAC will depend on the quality of the DACs. But the Node DAC is pretty good.

Qobuz does not use MQA, it streams FLAC files directly.

You can get ROON to look after all the TIDAL MQA processing (Decoder and Renderer) or you can get ROON to decode and your Node to act as a Renderer.

3

What is the difference in using ROON as a decoder and not as a decoder and renderer?

And where in ROON setting to just use to decode ONLY?

For the Node, what is the benefit to make it as a Renderer?

I could only assume ROON does a better job.

Or maybe i am wrong about that?

4

The main difference is that you can apply DSP in Roon before sending MQA to the DAC without destroying the MQA signalling.

However, Roon can’t do the rendering; this is only possible in hardware, and is unique for each device.

The capabilities in Roon Device Setup refer to the DAC not Roon. The Bluesound Node is both Decoder and Renderer, so you may set this up to do everything, or use the Roon core decoder, with rendering done by the Node.

1 Like
5

Thanks for clarifying my incorrect information.

I currently have ROON (on a Synology Diskstation) doing the decoding of the Tidal MQA stream and have the Node doing the rendering. I have trialed using the Node to do both the decoding and rendering. To be honest, I could not hear a difference from when Roon does the decoding! But my ears are getting old!

6

Okay. Thank you Frank! Lol😀. I will try both.

7

Thank you!

1 Like
8

How to set ROON to do the decoder only?

I see i could set Node to renderer only at MQA capabilities.

How about under “show advanced”
Enable MQA core decoder should be off or on if i request ROON to do the decoder?

9

I recommend you turn on Roon MQA decoding in case you want to also use Roon DSP. The Node will then do the MQA rendering. There is also no reason for the RCA cables to your stereo unless you think the stereo DAC sounds better than the Node DAC.

10

Got it. Thanks! By turning on Roon mqa decoding uses Roon dsp.

11

Roon can only do MQA decoding, not rendering. So, just turn on Roon MQA decoding. For the Node, there is probably a setting in Roon - Settings - Audio - Device setup (for the Node) where you choose MQA rendering.

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