Can you wake up the amp + allo dac from roon?
How does the volume control work? Do you use the Hegel HT bypass and control the DAC volume with roon.
No, unfortunately I have to turn on the amp manually. I don’t turn off the Allo unit. Also no HT, I use Allo at 0. db and use Hegel preamp and volume control with that. Though it’s possible to also adjust volume in the DAC.
You can do this with Home Assistant + RoonLabs music player - Home Assistant. I turn on the amp and switch to my RoPieee input when the player state changes.
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Hegel devices can be directly controlled via tcp with e.g. NodeRed and Home Assistant or many more…
This way you can control all function of the hegel like volume, power, source select etc.
The api for tcp control is found on the hegel website.
YMMV
I am not very familiar with home assistant. Does it need a server to run on a computer? Can I run it on my mac mini Roon Core? Hate to standup yet another always on device.
Home assistant seems interesting. Thanks for the tip. I am very interested to know how seemless the roon controls can be especially with a seperated streamer in the loop.
Powering on the system shouldn’t be too difficult like phi4 did. Volume control maybe trickier.
Can the roon remote control playback to the external DAC/streamer and still control Hegel amp volume level at the same time?
To be seemless amp volume feedback is also necessary in order to let roon remote know of any volume adjustment done directly on the amp knob.
From my experience this behaviour can only be achieved over upnp with Hegel amps (so bubbleunpnp not roon)
Even with roon remote playing directly over Airplay to the Hegel, I don’t think there is any volume level feedback from the amp.
Home Assistant, like Roon, functions best as an appliance-type server. There is a supported installation option via Docker, but I would advise against it; I previously ran Home Assistant via Docker alongside Roon Core on a decidedly multipurpose NUC, and the experience was rather poor, notably because HA multicast was interfering with Roon’s ability to see Chromecast devices. I would definitely not recommend installing it alongside the Roon server on the same machine. It’s a very lightweight server that can be run on pretty much any single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi, but that may be a dealbreaker for you.
So I installed Hass on Mac mini with vbox just to try it. It actually works pretty well and doesn’t seem to cause any problem running besides roon core. I am able to control Hegel with telnet switches I added manually to the yaml file, but not through the discovered DLNA device; which should in principle support all the basic functions?
The only problem I have is to figure out how to run virtual box and the corresponding vm at boot time as I have configured Mac mini to automatically turn off at midnight and turn back on in the morning.
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The home assistant integration has 2 way volume integration with roon endpoints - but doesn’t talk to other devices.
Of course home assistant integrates with many other devices - so it’s possible you might be able to communicate to the Hegel another way (eg via an IR blaster - although that’s one way).
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You can do volume ctrl on Hegel by sending these commands to port 50001:
-v.0.33\r
This sets the volume to 33% of your max.
you can define volume ctrl actions via telnet switch in home assistant.
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just an update about making home assistant automatically start on Mac mini at boot time. I followed these instructions here and it works great (you only need to set your account to login at startup in macOS users settings, which I already do to make Roon Core run).
other recipes I found on Oracle website were more complicated and gave me weird errors.