My FiiO M11S plays native resolution and works flawlessly in Roon Ready mode, but when I try Roon ARC or Roon Remote on M11S they tend to route the audio signal to android system SRC and convert everything to PCM 48kHz even FiiO said their player have Android Audio Global SRC Bypass feature.
But when I connect external DAC to FiiO M11S, Roon ARC and Roon Remote playback in native resolution, but I would like to use M11S’s internal DAC to decode these streaming app.
Yes this is well known and is on their radar to sort. They only sorted bitperfect for external dacs for ARC recently as Roon app or ARC would always resample and still will on DAPs. The Roon app has not changed nor is scheduled to at the moment they are only focusing on ARC for android bit perfect at this time.
There is a trick you can play while we wait, as @CrystalGipsy wrote, for Roon to improve ARCs ability to play at native frequencies.
On your M11S, ARC will play at the last frequency used by another app prior to ARC being launched. So if you play something at 44.1, 96, 172, etc. and then launch ARC, you will see ARC play at that frequency. You can use FiiO’s built-in music player, Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, and others to do this. You can’t just switch out of ARC, it has to fully quit, then use the other app, then launch ARC.
It’s a workaround. It’s not great. But it at least gives you some control over what’s happening. I made a collection of silent, 1 minute files in Audacity at various frequencies. I have them in internal memory and I use them if I want to set the DAC’s frequency to something specific. If you’re interested, I can share a link to them - no need for you to share any personal info, I can just DM you an anonymous link to a Google Drive folder.
