Configure ROON Labs with MERGING+NADAC on MacOS

Owned by David Jacques
Last updated: Mar 15, 2018
2 min read

How to configure NADAC with Roon on Mac Os ?

Prerequisite

The MERGING+NADAC CoreAudio driver is installed and configured
Roon media player is installed https://roonlabs.com/

  1. Start ROON player

  2. Click in the top left corner Menu and select Settings menu.


  3. Go to the Audio Menu, then select MERGING+NADAC and click on Enable.


  4. In the General tab :
    Set the Volume Control Mode to Use Device Controls
    Set the Resync delay to 1s


  5. Now in the Playback tab :
    Enable the Use Exclusive Mode option.
    Set the DSD Playback Strategy to DSD over PCM v1.0 (DoP)
    Set the Max DSD Sample Rate to Up to DSD256.
    Channel Layout should be set according to your NADAC model; 2.0 if you have a 2 Channels NADAC or 7.1 if you have a 8 Channels NADAC.
    Configure the Multichannel Mixing Strategy according to your needs  (see this page for details)
    Click on Save Settings.



  6. Enter a Zone Name for the MERGING+NADAC Device 


  7. You can now play music on your MERGING+NADAC.
    If you have several Zones defined, make sure you have selected the NADAC one.

     

  8. Disable App Nap for Roon
    App Nap can negatively affect Roon.

    1. Go to your Applications folder.
    2. Select the Roon application
    3. Right-click or control+click the Roon application
    4. Choose Get Info
    5. In the Roon Info window, under General, you will see an option to prevent App Nap, enable this checkbox.

     

    Note on Volume Leveling and Crossfade options

    Both Crossfade and Volume Leveling options in the Zone Settings page enables a sampling rate conversion for DSD files, which will prevent NADAC to run in DSD native mode, the conversion will force the device to run in DXD mode. Disable the Volume Leveling and leave the Crossfade option to 0 seconds if you don't want this conversion.
     
     


    DSP ENGINE

    Please use Roon DSP Engine features with caution, it can be very demanding resources wise, and therefore can cause drops for multichannels / high sampling rate playback !
    See this page for details