Streamer between Roon Nucleus Plus and DAC

@tcutter 

I too am a Roonaholic.

When I first started with Roon, I had my Roon Nucleus with Sbooster LPS streaming to itself feeding a Chord Qutest via Curious USB cable. It made for an enjoyable combination. A few years later I acquired a Bricasti M5 network bridge acting as Roon endpoint, and had that feeding the Qutest via Kimber D60 Coax, and to my ears this made for a significant jump in sound quality. I then upgraded my DAC to a Rockna Wavelight, and this notched things up once again. Earlier this year I replaced my Bricasti M5 with a Hifi Rose RS130 utilized as Roon endpoint. And again enjoyed a significant boost in SQ and audio enjoyment, first via the Kimber D60, and now via Tubulus Consentus I2S cable into the Wavelight. Then last month introduced a Melco S100/2 network switch into the mix. And was able to notch things up yet again. Currently the Melco and Rose are connected via RJ45 terminated ethernet cable (Wireworld Starlight Cat 8). But both the Melco switch and Rose RS130 support fiber, and I do intend to experiment with fiber in the future. Bottom line, in my own experience, found the streamer to be a major piece of the puzzle with respect to sound quality.

@audphile1 Playback Designs has a proprietary system that is built into some of their source devices but is also available free-standing. It accepts a USB input and converts it to an optical signal called PLINK, which uses an ST cable and connects to the DAC. It is different from toslink. Two supposed advantages are galvanic isolation and the clock in the interface is the same as the clock in the DAC. https://positive-feedback.com/reviews/hardware-reviews/playback-designs-usb-x4/

@jazzman7 May I distill your comments to, "Consider getting a better Roon-ready streamer than the Nucleus Plus"?

@tcutter 

Yes. Most definitely, do consider getting a better Roon-ready streamer.

Cool. In this case, you’d need to try a streamer in your system and see if it beats this PB Designs proprietary USB to fiber optic converter with Nucleus. Some of the streamers sound better with their native processing than they do as Roon end points. Besides unless someone is very familiar with this PBD converter and how it impacts sound, it’s impossible to predict. Trying is the only way to be sure.

Roon recommends splitting the core and endpoint, hence I run the core in a NUC in my server rack and another NUC also running ROCK in my hifi rack. This one is mounted in an Akasa case and it looks and sounds really nice. I feed my DAC via USB to a DDC for 2CH and my AVR via HDMI for MCH.