How to bypass HDMI on Nucleus

After more than two years of tussling with tech support regarding my Nucleus, I am ready to punt. I have spent much too much of my own time and that of my very competent consultant trying to solve the issue. Tech support has been willing to listen but their suggestions haven’t resolved the issue. It seems pretty clear that I have a hardware issue but Roon has not been willing to either fix my unit or send me a new one.

The problem is the Nucleus’s HDMI port. It doesn’t work. It used to work, but it doesn’t anymore. Back when the HDMI port worked, I had an HDMI cable from the Roon Nucleus HDMI port to the Marantz AV8801 HDMI input. That receiver processes the digital signal and outputs balanced outputs to my Marantz amplifer, which drives my B&W in-ceiling speakers in the living room.

In addition to the HDMI port, my Roon Nucleus has two Dragonfly DACs plugged in via USB. The RCA outputs from the DACs go to my NAD CI940 that powers two zones of two speakers each in other parts of the house. On the network, I have three Bluesound devices, one over Ethernet, two over wifi, along with two HiFiBerry DACs (Raspberry Pis) on the network. All the devices work fine and do not have any sort of connectivity issues.

I love the Roon software and want to continue using it. I don’t know why Roon is not willing to stand behind its product but other than the HDMI port, the Nucleus is working fine. So, the issue is, how to I get music to come through my best system, the one driven by the Marantz AV8801? The alternatives I am considering are as follows:

  1. Hook up a powered USB hub to one of the Nucleus’s USB ports. I would then output from the hub to the existing Dragonfly and also to a Douk Audio USB to Toslink converter. The Douk unit would then feed a digital signal over Toslink to the Marantz. I want to input a digital signal to the Marantz because it has a pretty good DAC.

  2. Buy another Raspberry PI and use the Toslink output to send a digital signal to the Living Room Marantz receiver.

Whichever way I go, the goal is to have music in my living room. So, learned community members, what are your thoughts?

8 posts were merged into an existing topic: Roon Nucleus not playing over HDMI