I’ve had a nagging problem for the last few month with Roon that I may have narrowed down. I notice it most often with Tidal, but I’m not sure it’s exclusive to Tidal.
My setup in my office is Mac Pro, OS 10.13.3, Teac UD-501 DAC
When running Roon in Exclusive mode, if I pause play minute, or if the queue runs empty, I see the DAC switch resolution (usually to 176k) and I’m unable to restart playback. Only after quitting Roon, reconnecting the DAC to the computer, and restarting both Roon and the DAC am I able to get everything running again. I’m guessing that Roon is partially releasing it’s exclusive control over the audio path, but it also unable to regain control when it tries to playback again.
This has become very repeatable (and very frustrating). For troubleshooting purposes, I don’t experience this problem if I disable exclusive mode on Roon. But, I don’t like the decrease in SQ by using core audio. I also don’t experience this problem using Audirvana in Exclusive Mode with this DAC and Tidal or local content. The issue has been present in perhaps the past 2-3 Roon updates.
Any help is much appreciated - I like using my Roon library at my desk, but this is driving me nuts. Thanks!
When Roon releases control of the device after the queue running empty or extended pause, are you able to play to the device using non-exclusive mode applications? Are you able to select the device as an output in MacOS system preferences?
In addition, I’m going to pass this information forward to the tech team for further analysis.
To followup on this after a fair amount of test, no, the DAC becomes inaccessible once Roon ‘releases’ control. I have tried to use it with Audirvana in non-exclusive mode, and with system audio (selecting as an output device). I also tried switching Roon into non-exclusive mode. Nothing works once Roon has left the DAC in this state, short of unplugging the USB cable from the computer and plugging it back in to re-initialize the USB connection. Definitely seems like a bug - is there a reason that Roon is releasing the DAC while in Exclusive Mode? It seems like it should just hang on until the software quits.
We’ve been able to reproduce some odd behavior with the Teac UD-501 on the Mac. In our testing, we were able to get the device into the state your describing with other applications as well. We’re looking into the issue to see if there’s anything we can do on our end.
Interesting. I have switched to SPDIF until we can get it resolved. I’m curious as to why Roon releases it’s exclusive mode lock after a time of inactivity? It doesn’t appear that Audirvana does this, and I’m imagining that this may be the reason the problem hasn’t appeared when using that particular solution.
I’ve been able to do some more testing with the UD-501, and I believe I have found a workaround that gets the device back into a functional state. When the device becomes unresponsive as you’ve explained, I’m able to get playback restarted by opening the DSP engine in Roon and enabling then disabling Sample Rate Conversion with the drop down set to “Max PCM Rate (Power of 2)”.
Thanks John - I’ll try it and let you know if I have success. However, if this is a best-case solution then I’ll probably either stick with SPDIF or move to a different DAC for a permanent fix.