I recently got a Hifiman EF400 amp/DAC. From Roon, through an RPi4B/Ropieee XL to the EF400, I get no gain driving any of the various headphones I have. Very low volume levels with the attenuator all the way up. I’m connecting Tidal, Qobuz, and my own local library.
Connected directly to a PC, with Roon, or using Foobar, or using the RPi4B with PiCorePlayer/Squeezelite/LMS, everything works as expected.
I looked through the Roon and Ropieee XL configuration settings and didn’t find anything to solve the problem.
One thing I saw was different in Roon between direct PC vs Ropieee XL connections is that with the direct PC connection the toggle option to have the device take exclusive control is available, but that device configuration option isn’t available when running through Ropieee XL.
My core and preferred set up is streaming Roon via RPi4B, and I would like this to work with the EF400.
Linux is exclusive by nature you don’t need to switch it on like in Windows as it’s a given. As for gain it should have no affect if your connecting via usb unless your configuring it wrong somehow. Do you have volume control set as fixed as it should be and volume controlled by the controls on the amp.
Wasn’t aware of this amp, so looked it up, sounds like an interesting combo and the price is crazy.
I think I’ve seen cases on ropieee where ‘device volume’ isn’t set to max, even when it isn’t being used.
So you could temporarily change the ‘device settings / volume’ options in turn to ‘device volume’ and ‘dsp volume’ and make sure the settings are what you expect (probably 100% if you’re not using them).