Hegel H360 DSD Driver for ROCK

[hgim82 (Andrew)]

As I posted a couple of years ago, Hegel H360 requires DSD driver software installed on the Roon core machine (Apple or Windows). Now that I switched to a NUC-based ROCK core, I cannot play DSD music on H360 anymore. And Hegel does not support DSD driver for ROCK! This is a tricky situation and I don’t know whom to ask to develop a driver for ROCK. Since ROCK is Linux-based, I suppose this is a very simple modification of the existing Apple driver.

Could your developer team communicate with Hegel to build a driver that runs on ROCK? The driver software can be downloaded from Hegel website:

https://www.hegel.com/products/integrated/h360

Let me know if Roon can help or whether I should make the request to Hegel. Thank you for your continuing excellence.

[Fernando_Pereira]

@support I own an H360, but I use an external DAC with it so I never paid attention to its USB settings. However, I’ve read Hegel’s documentation carefully. As far as I can see, they don’t require a separate driver for Linux. ROCK is based on a stripped-down Linux system, so ROCK and H360 should work together. It’s possible that the (version of) the Linux USB audio driver needs to be configured in some way. Indeed, if you look around the Hegel site, you’ll see instructions on how to set it on an Ubuntu Linux distribution. My recommendation would be to contact Hegel to get confirmation of what they require in Linux.

[hgim82 (Andrew)]

Thanks for the useful information. But ROCK is a barebone Linux, so even if there is a simple setting change needed, I wouldn’t know how to access the terminal screen and type in proper line commands. I would rather rely on Roon support team for further advice.

[Fernando_Pereira]

That’s why I tagged this thread with Roon’s support address in my previous message

[wklie (Peter Lie)]

Since ROCK is Linux-based, I suppose this is a very simple modification of the existing Apple driver.

No. The fact that something requires an audio driver for Mac OS implies generally it won’t work on Linux.

DSD play problem on HEGEL HD30

I took our HD30 down off the rack to fool around with it and see what’s up. I tried it with several Linux-based platforms (ROCK, DietPi, Ubuntu, and a microRendu), just in case one of them had some magic that ROCK is missing. The result was the same across the board. My conclusion was: This device is not currently capable of any form of DSD playback (DoP or Native) with Linux at all because Hegel does not support DSD playback on Linux. You are having trouble with ROCK because, like most media …

[wklie (Peter Lie)]

To put it simply, to be able to play DSD without converting to PCM by Roon, you have to install Windows (or Mac OS) on the NUC, run Roon on it, instead of using ROCK.

[hgim82 (Andrew)]

Thanks for the useful info. However, the latest Hegel website seems to indicate that Apple OS does not need a driver, so there may have been some firmware updates. I will have to check with Hegel about this.

[hgim82 (Andrew)]

To follow up, I contacted Hegel and they officially confirm that H360 does not support the DSD driver for Linux.

[noris]

Hello @hgim82,

Thank you for letting us know your findings after contacting Hegel. As Peter mentioned, if you would like to have DSD supported on your setup I would recommend installing Windows on your NUC and using Hegel’s DSD drivers.

Thanks,
Noris