today I received my new Brookly DAC+. I would like to use it with Roon, the Roon Core is installed on my iMac. However, the iMac is located about 10m away from the place where the DAC+ is located.
For connection of the DAC to the MAC via USB I was trying to use the following 10m USB A/B cable:
However, the connection seems to be not stable enough. When I e.g. play MQA files from Tidal, the green MQA-indictaor is blinking once in a while and switches between MQA „on“ an „off“.
Therefore, I tried the following USB-extension cable which has sort of a repeater/amplifier function:
To this extension cable I simply connected the USB A/B cable that came with the Brooklyn. It seems to work much better than the cable from my first attempt, the MQA signal is now stable.
However, I am wondering if the 10m long repeater cable might somehow negatively influence the overall sound quality. Does such a repeater cable introduce jitter?
Would it be better to setup a Roon ROCK Nuc that I can place directly next to the DAC+?
I really would appreciate If you could share your thoughts on this.
Thanks for your answers. Bottom line: No 10m cable from the iMac to the DAC.
With respect to my opening post:
Maybe it is also possible to use my Mac Mini via Ethernet as Roon Bridge/Endpoint? I could place it directly next to the DAC and connect it with a short USB cable.
Roon Core could then remain on the iMac (10m away). T
What do you think? Would the chain „Core (iMac) >> Bridge (Mini) >> DAC“ impair the sound quality? Core and Bridge are connected via Ethernet.
Short answer: No. This is a verry good solution. I have a windows Roon-Bridge in my chain (Roon Rock >> 20m ethernet cable kat7 >> Notebook Windows 7 OS only >> usb-cable 0,7m >> DAC) and it sounds great. No problem with upsampling all to 384 MHz. Tried my Rock with direct-connection to the DAC, there is no hearable differenze in soundquality (my ears).
Important: The maximum length of a USB cable must not exceed 5m. But here is the shorter the better.