DSD via Roon/AIR - Unsupported but Works

[Jean-Marie]

Whatever

This is what they announced.

"DSD64 (DSD 1x) is now supported on USB and every high speed PCM digital input, through DoP v1.0 (DSD over PCM)"

Note, it doesn't say "with the exception of via our AIR driver"

Also, if it's not supported why are the specs part of AIR and available for Roon to integrate?

The fact that the website omits the feature, is obviously since they broke it in the latest AIR for Macs.

From what I can guess, the lack of support for DSD on the Mac for the AIR driver from Devialet was not coming from a limitation of the AIR protocol itself but from the core audio software subsystem of the Mac itself.

Version 2 of AIR was having a kernel extension and this is what was causing a lot of the dreaded drops and white noise. Air 3, went to a full user space solution, but it then had to go through Core Audio which to my knowledge does not support DSD.

Roon is in a different situation because they are both the player and the AIR driver, therefore they don't need, and they don't use, any of the OS audio system, they just read the file and do all the treatments inside their application until they get the packet required for AIR to be shipped to the Deviate. This leaves much more flexibility than when you need to conform to the Sound API of Mac OS which is known to have problems.

For what it is worth, I have found complains from professional customers using high end audio gears either through USB or Firewire logging bugs against apple for the exact same problem, and obviously the problem remained intact since.

My two cents.

Jean-Marie