Lets confine this discussion to USB for a second, since there are a range of other situations with networked products that play by different rules.
A few things to keep in mind:
- We (mostly) only recognize products if the company has a relationship with us and has enrolled the devices in the Roon Tested program.
- We only recognize products that have unique identifiers in the first place–it is very common for a manufacturer to make one USB audio module, then “share” its identity across many products. For example, you might see something like “FooCorp USB Audio 2.0”. These scenarios make it impossible to precisely identify devices.
- We can only recognize products via driver frameworks that provide information about the USB device associated with a sound driver. This means ALSA, WASAPI, CoreAudio, but not Android or ASIO.
- We CAN recognize devices that are plugged into a Roon Ready USB bridge, but only if they meet the above criteria.
To address some more specific points…
Chord 2Qute connected via USB to an Auralic Aries and… Roon doesn’t see beyond the Aries (all it says is “USB Output”)
We do see behind the Aries, but Chord hasn’t submitted this device for “Roon Tested”, so it is not recognized. We do recognize some other Chord devices.
How about Roon endpoints connected to DACs via Toslink, Digital Coax and AES/EBU? I’m guessing Roon Core has no idea what DAC is connected with those DAC inputs?
There is no mechanism available to us to do this.
We first had this idea back in 2015–it’s one of the reasons why we added all of this device identification support to Roon in the first place, in fact. As you say, it’s up to MQA whether or not to allow something like this.