iOS exclusive mode?

I’m thinking of buying an ipod touch to use as a small factor roon endpoint with my chord mscaler. I understand ios does not support exclusive mode so roon doesn’t bypass the os of the ipod touch. I also know a ios ipad/phone/ipod touch emits a bit perfect purple light lossless signal of 44.1khz for roon cd quality albums. If roon is not controlling the ios device with exclusive mode how does the ios device know how to emit a bit perfect untouched lossless stream of music to the dac or in my case chord mscaler? thanks mk

can i also double check ipod touch is ok for a roon enpoint?@support

finally a strange question can an ipod touch end point be controlled by my imac core without having to handle the ipod touch?

Hi @musickid,

This only happens if you play to the iOS speakers. If you have a dedicated DAC connected via USB to it, you can get a higher sample rate, and can configure the max sample rate in the device setup tab. I suggest using the Apple Camera Kit USB3 as the regular one often doesn’t provide enough power via the USB port:

I don’t see why it wouldn’t work, but doesn’t look like it’s listed in our iPhone/iPad Compatible models list. I can double check with the team for you on this and confirm. If other members are perhaps using an iPod Touch, please do let us know here.

Assuming you can install the app without issue, yes, if you disable private zone mode then you can control your iOS device from the PC interface.

thanks noris,

One point i need to understand. my aim is to just stream 44.1khz files (exactly as the tidal cd flac file is) from roon to the ipod touch to my chord mscaler. I’m pretty sure this should be ok as i remember once doing it when experimenting with an ipad air. I want the signal path to be lossless purple lights with no upsampling or downsampling in roon at all. I understand there is only an issue once you get to 48khz. I also found this quote:

I use both iPhone SE and iPad Air2 with a USB DAC (Chord Mojo) and get the ‘purple’ bit perfect indicator. Note that Roon only sees the iOS device and system sounds will be heard if enabled.

Can you confirm i can pass 44.1khz files with the purple lossless signal path with no issues? Many thanks.

And yes other memebers have used the ipod touch and it is listed in the roon remotes in the app store.

Yes, should be fine. I don’t have a Chord MScalar but I have a Dragonfly connected via USB to my iPhone, playing 44.1 lossless right now:

Excellent. The last query by disabling private zone i can control the ipod touch from the core. Do private zone settings have any affect on my goal which is to get the purple light lossless signal path? And when disabling private zone how exactly does this enable me to control the ipod from the core?

No, private zone does not affect the audio output, just makes the device visible from the Core interface.

Your iOS device should appear as a zone, and you can select it from the regular zone menu. You might need to activate it first in Roon Settings -> Audio from the Core menu. And you should turn off the private zone option in the Roon app on the iPod itself in Device Setup (On iPod Touch -> Roon Settings -> Audio -> Cogwheel Icon next to iPod zone name).

Your help is much appreciated. Thanks mk.

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