I had my MacBook hooked up wirelessly to bridge and it suddenly stopped working. It worked great for a year and a half or more. I then got looking at the owners manual and it states the best sound is utilizing a USB cable. So I have now hooked it up direct to the Directstream DAC. My question is, if I am hooked directly to the dac with my computer does this not render the bridge as not required since I am sending the signal via Roon directly to the Dac? And if not using bridge then from my understanding I am no longer getting MQA. Correct? Sure would be nice for those of us that are not network system pros if they just had a simple diagram in the owner manuals on exactly how to be hooked up.
Welcome, Jethro!
The Bridge Ethernet card is “just another input”, like AES, I2S, toslink or coax. You can use any one or all of these inputs (one at a time) to feed a digital signal to the DS.
The Bridge is the only DS input that handles/“unfolds” MQA-encoded files.
Hope this helps some…
So again not a network pro. That just raises more questions for me. I currently have my router hooked to the bridge. So how do I get the roon core to play thru the bridge 2? I do not have a streamer or NAS but would like to play MQA via my Mac via tidal thru roon.
In short, you have to set up and select the DS DAC/Bridge as a Roon endpoint from the Roon Core software interface on your computer or mobile device.
You also have to enable Tidal via Roon and sign into your Tidal account through the Roon Core interface.
If you can’t quite get there without additional help, I would go to the Roon forums and search for an appropriate thread for help. The terms “PS Audio Bridge set up” should get you pretty close to home, I would think.
Good luck.
The Bridge certainly isn’t a necessity in order to play Roon. USB will be completely fine. Also, Roon software is able to unfold MQA, so that will also be taken care of if you go through USB as well.
As far as setting up the Bridge with Roon, it’s pretty straight forward. If the FW is up to date on the Bridge and DAC, its works pretty smoothly. Roon does a great job working through the setup process. One of the major selling points of Roon is how intuitive it is.
Thanks so much for your helpful suggestions but I guess I’m not being clear enough asking what I am wondering. How do I physically hook my computer to the Dac and or router so that I am utilizing the bridge? I have no problem doing set up with in Roon I just don’t know how to physically connect everything so I can utilize the 900 dollar card I bought. I thought I did so wirelessly from my computer to the bridge that is hooked up to my router via cat 6 cable. This is how I ran it until either an update on my Mac or the Dac happened. It worked great for a year and a half and then stopped working. Maybe my problem is that I don’t understand what the bridge 2 is actually supposed to do. What is the actual usage of the bridge?
There has been no recent DAC or Bridge update but their was a recent Mac update that is the likely culprit. A simple thing to try to fix the issue is to shut everything completely down all the way back to the Router and then back up one device at a time and see if that clears up the issue. These issues are pretty common every time Mac does any significant software update. Also Tidal is rumored to have made some changes to their process lately so also try signing out of Tidal and back in.
Sounds like you already have it connected properly. If the Bridge has a proper connection to your LAN along with your computer, they’ll be able to talk to each other. I’d try what Dawk suggested and do a hard reboot of everything in the chain. Network and all.
I’m sorry for being so dense but I just want to clarify. I should hook my computer to the router instead of thru USB ,so my bridge and computer are hooked to router?
Right. Bridge should be hooked to router. Then computer should be hooked to router either with an ethernet cable or wirelessly.