I am new to Roon — I started my trial today. So far I really like using it. I am one of those folks who has meticulously maintained their metadata so I have a little ways to go getting my music to look “right” in Roon. But it has been a most excellent experience so far.
I have encountered some odd behavior when playing back through my XMC-1. I’m running Windows 10 64bit on a NUC in my living room. All the latest updates are applied. Roon is installed on the NUC and is running perfectly. I’m connected using a short USB cable, without any hubs or other equipment along the way, from the NUC directly to the USB input on the XMC-1. But for some reason, Roon reports that the USB input is only capable of 16 bits precision. To make things more bizarre, the XMC-1 display reports 24 bits PCM flowing in on that input!
On further investigation, I noticed something else strange — the USB input seems to disappear or simply fail to reconnect. Is there a better driver to use that’s more reliable? The only one available is “ASIO for Generic USB Device” at the moment. Also on the list in Roon is “ASIO for USB” but that fails any time I try to enable that interface. See the attached screenshots for reference.
@Dan_Herrmann — I’m doing sample rate conversion to upsample to take advantage of the easier filtering at higher sampling rates. Is there some other way I should be achieving this? Even without sample rate conversion I’m still seeing the reported 16 bits.
Wow that’s great news! I see you are using WASAPI. When I first tried to install the WASAPI drivers on this system I couldn’t get them to work with the XMC-1. Can you share how you did it? Where you found those drivers?? Thanks!
Did you try to find the ASIO control panel? Most ASIO drivers come with a control panel. This has nothing to do with Roon and is with your devices drivers and setup.
In that control panel one of the options is the ability to set the bit depth for the ASIO driver. For example, my ASUS audio card has ASIO drivers and its control panel is this:
As you can see, I can set the bit depth with the drop down. Likewise, my Peachtree amp has an ASIO control program.
You might want to review this support thread as I think it is relevant.
I loaded the WASAPI from the Emotiva website, but I can’t find them there now. If you’d like, I can search on my PC for them. IIRC, they were a little bit of a pain to install because they weren’t signed and required me to use my admin rights to get past that.
I’ve found that the more I tweak the greater the chances of losing that awesome purple star!
@Rugby — that did the trick. I located that exact ASIO panel by using (dare I say it) JRiver’s output device configuration panels. I adjusted the drop down exactly as you’ve shown it and I’m good to go now. The weirdest thing was I couldn’t access that ASIO control panel any other way. [shrug]
@Dan_Herrmann — I would love to see that driver posted. I too searched the Emotiva website for it and couldn’t locate it. I emailed Emotiva support asking about it too. I remember going through disabling the driver signature check once before for the older version of Emotiva’s drivers. Tweaking breeds trouble? I know that all too well…
Thanks to all of you for sharing your experience and wisdom
@wizardofoz — so far (one day of correctly configured usage) I feel the same that the ASIO drivers are working correctly. However I’m learning that WASAPI is known to be superior and more stable with higher bitrate sources. Have you run into any troubles playing back high bitrate DSD or 352.8kHz+ PCM? I’m very curious!
