I had a great experience with Roon customer service recently that I thought I’d share.
When I first bought the Vinnie Rossi LIO integrated when it came out, maybe 2014-ish, I started with a MicroRendu streamer, which had a GUI interface. It worked intermittently, and was a bit of a source of frustration for me, I’m assuming primarily because I didn’t know how to work it properly. It also had a bit of a tendency to overheat. Anyhoo, I upgraded to the Bryston BDP3 streamer maybe two years ago.
Both of these devices have GUI, but the Bryston has a face panel that one can control the device. The MR and the Bryston had something in common, in that they both intermittently refused to handshake with the VR DAC. The DAC was working fine through the optical port during this time, and if I plugged a source directly into the USB, it worked fine as well.
But I got bitten hard by the Roon bug, and ended up getting a Roon Nucleus to run the core, as well as putting all my music on a 4TB NAS. So, I really wanted to stream to the Bryston through Cat6 Ethernet that I had run to every room in my house when we were gutting it.
We knew that the issue lay with the DAC and the streamer handshaking after troubleshooting it, and I figured the GUI settings for the streamer were incorrect. For the life of me I could not find the settings in the GUI to select the LIO DAC as the output. Even when I did find it eventually, I would select this and nothing would happen. After much gnashing of teeth of which I will spare you the details, I found out a back door into the Bryston GUI that fixed the issue instantly, and if any of you have run into this issue I thought I would share with you the solution.
Go to Roon Settings–Audio. Under the device with the GUI (Bryston BDP3 in my case) select device info. In that pop up menu, select configure device. This takes you to the backdoor GUI and the correct audio output page is instantly booted up. There you can select LIO DAC, hit save, and that’s it.
Importantly, when I would accidentally get this to work through other means in the past, the handshake would drop when either unit was turned off, and I would have to reinvent the wheel. Vinnie and I thought leaving the streamer on would prevent this, but since I found this fix, it has borne out that whenever I turn either device off, or specifically turn the L2 off and leave the streamer on, I will still have to go to configure device to get the handshake to occur.
If this issue is plaguing anyone else I thought I would share this super simple fix.
Does anyone use a streamer that will automatically initiate the handshake when the streamer is booted up first and DAC second, without needing to adjust a GUI setting?
Thanks everyone!