I, too, have been using a Bryston BDP-1 with Roon; and I’m happy to report that my experience has been more positive than WimJ’s.
Before Roon, I had a few Squeezebox Touches fed from LMS 7.9. I have been adding quite a lot of DSF files to my library and I was about to install EDO on one or more of the Touches to unlock the better listening experience DSD provides. Then I found a BDP-1 for sale on eBay. I convinced myself that it held the promise of even better performance than an upgraded Touch, so I bought it. Alas, I was never able to get it to play my DSF files unless I transferred them to a USB drive directly attached to the BDP. PCM files, however, played flawlessly when streamed from LMS.
The problem with the DSFs seems to arise from the handshake between the BDP and LMS. The BDP tells LMS that it can handle DSF “natively”, so LMS does not offer the option of converting the files to DoP for transport. At the other end, the BDP refuses to convert the stream to DoP, even when the appropriate box is checked in the list of DACs connected to the BDP. My primary DAC is a Benchmark DAC2, whose display indicates that no recognizable data is being received. When I substitute a Wyred4Sound DAC, I do have audio; but the display indicates that it is receiving 352.8 kHz PCM. With DSD128, even the W4S remains silent.
So I shelved the BDP and again toyed with an EDO upgrade for my Squeezeboxes. But before I got around to that (which can take quite a long time for me ;)), Roon 1.1 burst onto the scene with Squeezebox support. I dusted off the BDP, made sure the Squeezelite service was enabled, and was delighted to see that Roon listed it along with my Squeezebox Touches. Furthermore, Roon gave me the option of converting DSF to DoP at the server end.
I connected the Benchmark to the BDP and was immediately rewarded with glorious sound – which the Benchmark identified as DSD. I’m chalking this up as an unexpected benefit of the primarily one-way implementation of the Squeezebox transport adopted by Roon. The BDP thinks it is receiving 176.4 kHz PCM and passes it straight through to the DAC, no questions asked. I should mention that this all works only for the BDP’s coaxial output (and, I presume, AES though I haven’t checked). I can’t get anything out via USB. That’s not a problem for me because the Benchmark is one of the few DACs that will accept DSD via its coax input; and the 192 kb/s limit for that interface isn’t an issue because I’m not interested in DSD128 or other super-fast formats. The DSD128 file mentioned earlier has been replaced with a DSD64 version, since my 66-year-old ears cannot hear the difference!
For me, the Roon-to-BDP (Squeezelite) link has proven very robust, with none of the interruptions WimJ experienced when using Shairplay. I’m a happy camper and a Roon lifetime subscriber as a result. Woohoo!