RoonReady device with AES output?

Anything other than the Auralic Aries?

Any Meridian Sooloos output with SpeakerLink output has balanced AES. You can buy SpeakerLink to AES cable from some of the cable sellers on the Meridian HitchHikers forum.

The Meridian MS600 has native balanced out, as does the incredible but expensive 818v3 (and 808v6).

Any non over-kill solutions. Basic passthrough is all I need.

MS200 is only a few hundred. And will probably get cheaper shortly.

24/192 and DSD 64 support?

Sure, but to be fair, the MS600 is cheaper than the Aries… However, no, only the 818v3 will do 192 and DSD64 (via DoP) and then only via the USB input (which is an appalling lack of functionality across the range and product IMHO).

Quick question, you do mean balanced analogue output? If so, there’s no such thing as “basic pass-through” for decent audio quality, but if you mean balanced digital output, I’m not aware of a 192 and DSD64 solution.

Edit: Perhaps a Squeezebox Touch or SonicOrbiter and a USB to balanced bridge (if the latter exists).

Yes I meant balanced digital output. I have a Devialet so I want to feed it digital and I’m getting sick of it’s crappy Air and USB drivers. AES/EBU is their recommended input.

It’s not out yet, but you might want to take a look at Nativ Vita.

Besides the Aries, there is also The Musica Pristina A Capella II. It is RoonReady and has an AES option, but it’s definitely in overkill solution territory :confused:

I am using an RPi with an IQaudIO Pi-Digi+ driving my BADA Alpha DACs. (I have a couple of systems running this way.) The connection is S-PDIF rather than AES/EBU but, essentially there is no difference between connecting with AES/EBU, S-PDIF (coaxial), and TOSlink.

I know that, within audio circles there is a sense that, somehow, AES/EBU is superior to either S-PDIF or TOSlink but with a good DAC that has an analog reference oscillator that is phase-locked to the extracted clock from the bit-stream, there is no difference between all three.

(Not having to phase lock the local clock is one of the reasons that async USB transfer is preferred but if your DAC uses an analog PLL to lock a low-phase-noise oscillator to use as the DAC clock, there really is no advantage to async USB transfers.)