I’d like to suggest that Roon offers, as audio configuration option, to send DSD as DSD-over-PCM (DoP) even to (Roon-Ready) devices that do not advertise DSD or DoP capabilities.
Rationale:
- Streamers usually offer digital outputs, and if a DoP-capable DAC is connected to one of those outputs it can unpack DoP to DSD and convert that with the means available to it. In particular with high-end set-ups employing separate boxes, this is a common scenario.
- DoP’s general use case is to deliver DSD thru a DSD-unaware PCM pipeline to an endpoint that is. This is exactly what we’re looking at here.
- To that end, DoP is designed such that it does no harm to DoP-unaware hardware, for example when that hardware mistakes DoP for actual PCM, converts it and presents it on its analog outputs, for example in the end to loudspeakers. Therefore, there is no real point in protecting against user error: A warning popup that configuring DoP only works if somewhere down the pipeline there is a DoP-aware device suffices, without keeping users from delivering DoP just because the Roon-Ready device at the front, which Roon directly speaks to, is not.
Please let me reiterate that this is not a device-specific problem: The point is exactly to send DoP to a device that is not DoP-aware.