Sorry for the slow response, @Dan_Knight …this was lost in the holiday shuffle.
We don’t have plans to allow Roon Bridge to talk to non hw:X,X devices because a number of things fall apart if we can’t be sure we’re talking to a hardware device.
In many cases, the default device presents “wide-open” hardware capabilities, which interferes with Roon’s ability to make good decisions about sample rate and bit depth conversions. Non-hardware devices sometimes perform faster-than-realtime buffering or pre-loading, which interferes with our clock management and synchronization technologies. Also, having arbitrary downstream DSP undermines the integrity and usefulness of Roon’s signal path display.
As far as EQ is concerned, Roon 1.3 will ship with its own parametric equalizer and will be able to load convolution filters generated by external EQ software.