Playback Designs MPD3 issues with Roon

Hello, I have been using Roon for some time without issue but I purchased a used Playback Designs MPD3 dac and an issue has come up. I can play anything/everything with the Same PC win 10 and now 11 to the PB DAC via JRiver 29 without issue. I have the PB 1.1 Asio driver installed and no issue at all. When I shut down the JRIVER 29 program and run the Roonbridge program I enable the MPD3 and pick it as the playback option. It finds it fine but will only play one or two tracks and then quits. I am then unable to repick the MPD3 as the playback zone unless I reboot the DAC. It will then find it and the glitch will happen again. I have installed a different PC with Jriver 29 and Roonbridge but the same will happen again and again. I have a Denafrips Venus 12 DAC and it does not have this issue or my Schiit Bifrost again they both work with Roon fine only the PB MPD3 has this issue. And the PB on the same PC running JRiver also works fine and sounds fine. I have been messing with this problem for over a month now and it still is here. I even upgraded to Win 11 on both the PC thinking that may be the issue but no joy with that either. My other zones work fine even if playing at the same time just the PB glitches playing with Roon. A bit more info this PC is being used as the endpoint. My core is on a NUC8I7 running Rock with 16 gigs RAM and a 256 NVME SSD & a 4TB SSD in a Akasa fanless case. The Core runs great without issue and stays cool plus has a Linear power supply.

Well it seems I have figured out this issue. The PD Mpd3 supports native DSD up to 2X. What was happening is on my Roon playlists I intermix PCM & DSD files but it would glitch when going into a DSD file from PCM file. Roon would show it was still playing the file but no sound would be coming out. In JRiver I play DSD files Native but in Roon for some reason I have to have it set to DSD over PCM mode not native or it will glitch?? If anyone has a fix please let me know. Thx

Hi @Russ_Roberts,

Thank you for the report. The team is eager to investigate this issue and has enabled diagnostic logging in the background. At your convenience, please let us know either a) a timestamp of this failure or b) the name of a track that failed to play properly under the conditions described in your post.

Hello Connor, It seems that this has been reported before concerning Playback Designs Dacs and Roon. I looked thru the archives and a user reported this same issue with a PB MPD8 which is newer than my MPD3. According to the archive this was dealt with and fixed in Roon version 1.7 if my memory serves and the user reported it was working correctly after that. What is happening in my case was the same basic issue he had spoken of. The PB Designs DACs need to be set as DSD over PCM to work correctly instead of native. My DAC works with JRiver in native but not with Roon. I guess the issue was with Linux operating system not recognizing the Playback DACs supporting the native protocol. When you are playing a playlist with both PCM and DSD files intermixed when it goes from PCM to DSD it either won’t play the file at all or it gives a high pitched bunch or fizz over the speakers. The only way to get it back to playing is to restart the DAC and restart playback and then switch the Roon setting for the DAC to DoP and then it works fine…but is should work in Native settings. It seems to do this every time so it isn’t with a particular file although sometimes it will play thru in native for a cut or so them glitch again.

Hey @Russ_Roberts,

Thanks for the follow up! Could you please reproduce the issue and share the specific track name, along with the date and time?

From there, we’ll enable diagnostic mode on your Roon Server for a closer look. Thanks! :+1:

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