I have a zen dac which is a headphone amp and a DAC. I was wondering can I plug it directly into my nucleus? Also what advantages will I gain by doing so? Will I be able to listen to my hd 660s with Roon and will it improve the overall sound of my system?
Compared to what? You don’t say what you do now.
I currently have my zen dac plugged into my laptop through USB when I want to use my headphones using tidal and not Roon. I just took delivery of my nucleus.
Also my current set-up is a bluesound node 2i connected optically to a pair of Kanto YU6 powered speakers with a rega planar 1 connect through RCA to the back of the powered speakers which has a phono preamp built in. I also have a Kanto sub 8 plugged into the speakers as well. The node is connected by wifi.
Plugging it into the nucleus could possibly be better as there is less going on electrically and processes but…it may not.
Hi @Garry_Underwood I have this set-up and I did try it from the NUC running Rock and it sounded great and drove my headphones wonderfully.
Lot’s of people recommended using a raspberry pi with decent power supply and I did eventually do that along with a few other tweaks, but I got 80-90% of the quality from just plugging the Zen DAC directly into the Nuc
Give it a try as you have nothing to lose. Just remember to enable to Audio zone in the settings
Regards
Mike
Thank you! Will do!
Enjoy it and hopefully you will be happy with the quality. The Zen DAC is a great little DAC and headphone amp and I’m always so impressed with it on long listening sessions
If not 100% happy you can try the Pi to feed the Zen DAC. £200 gets you a great little external streamer that feeds the app. Just add a good case and power supply and decent USB cables and maybe a USB noise suppressor as well as Roopie or other client with Roon bridge on it and you should be flying.
Regards
Mike
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+1 on this.
Ive had a Zen DAC for a while.
Recently added a Pi4 with RoPieee.
This combo is a killer setup for value, footprint, features and sound quality.
Nice 