Introducing Lina: A new dCS system, purpose built for headphone listeners

[ThanatosVI]

@dCS Team I'm a little sad, that the Lina doesn't have a Roon Core.

The small chassis is such a perfect fit for additional devices like Roon Core or an electrostatic amplifier.
As well as a separate upsampler similar to the Vivaldi Upsampler. (Or the Chord MScaler and soon to be released Superscaler)
Or CD Transport, just like the bigger dCS devices.

Most importantly for me would be the Roon Core though

 

[adrianm]

@dCS Team I'm a little sad, that the Lina doesn't have a Roon Core.

The small chassis is such a perfect fit for additional devices like Roon Core or an electrostatic amplifier.
As well as a separate upsampler similar to the Vivaldi Upsampler. (Or the Chord MScaler and soon to be released Superscaler)
Or CD Transport, just like the bigger dCS devices.

Most importantly for me would be the Roon Core though

I'd be fine with dCS offering Apple music integration. Might ditch Roon entirely. I have a Nucleus, but am 100% sure Roon is doing shady stuff to make it sound better than my old gaming pc and other streamers. As is everyone these days.

 

[GoldenSound]

I'd be fine with dCS offering Apple music integration. Might ditch Roon entirely. I have a Nucleus, but am 100% sure Roon is doing shady stuff to make it sound better than my old gaming pc and other streamers. As is everyone these days.

Roon is 100% bitperfect unless you're doing some sort of DSP

 

[adrianm]

Roon is 100% bitperfect unless you're doing some sort of DSP

Yet the Nucleus sounded different from my gaming PC (which i begrudgingly accepted after years of saying that it's bitperfect ), and different from an Innuos server...which was very obviously louder than any of them, but my gaming PC just sounded...Grainy. And I was purely using both as servers when I did a 3 way shootout, completely expecting them to sound identical. And just for clarity, I hate the Nucleus. Another box, scratched up my furniture in 2 apartments now, and as a software developer myself, I know the only difference here is probably DSP.

 

[GoldenSound]

Yet the Nucleus sounded different from my gaming PC (which i begrudgingly accepted after years of saying that it's bitperfect ), and different from an Innuos server...which was very obviously louder than any of them, but my gaming PC just sounded...Grainy. And I was purely using both as servers when I did a 3 way shootout, completely expecting them to sound identical. And just for clarity, I hate the Nucleus. Another box, scratched up my furniture in 2 apartments now, and as a software developer myself, I know the only difference here is probably DSP.

Sounding different from a gaming PC isn't too much of a surprise as it's likely a WAY lower noise device.

As to sounding different than the innuous, idk what the performance of those is like, but if one is outright louder than the other one of them has some DSP enabled.

 

[ThanatosVI]

I'd be fine with dCS offering Apple music integration. Might ditch Roon entirely. I have a Nucleus, but am 100% sure Roon is doing shady stuff to make it sound better than my old gaming pc and other streamers. As is everyone these days.

I'm really into Roon. By far the best out there imo.
For that reason I'm also only considering servers that are built with Roon in mind

 

[adrianm]

Sounding different from a gaming PC isn't too much of a surprise as it's likely a WAY lower noise device.

Still, bits are bits , I'm converting ethernet to optical and back to ethernet with a LPSU before feeding the Rossini, so it should make no difference that the Roon server is hosted on a gaming pc...

I'm really into Roon. By far the best out there imo.
For that reason I'm also only considering servers that are built with Roon in mind

I was too, but these days i do 90% of my listening on Airpods pro 2 in the gym so...less a fanatic, and Apple music has gotten pretty good. I also kind of hate maintaining 2 separate playlists, and I'm not sure how well a playlist export would work

 

[ThanatosVI]

Still, bits are bits , I'm converting ethernet to optical and back to ethernet with a LPSU before feeding the Rossini, so it should make no difference that the Roon server is hosted on a gaming pc...

I was too, but these days i do 90% of my listening on Airpods pro 2 in the gym so...less a fanatic, and Apple music has gotten pretty good. I also kind of hate maintaining 2 separate playlists, and I'm not sure how well a playlist export would work

Understandable situation.
For the gym playlist I use either Roon ARC or the Tidal App.
Let's me use the same playlists

 

[wagninger]

I find this so interesting… I could never listen to music while working out, the rhythm never matches my heartbeat or the speed of my repetitions, so it throws me off… I listen to podcasts every time.

Never use the AirPods Pro to listen to music, anyway

 

[ThanatosVI]

I find this so interesting… I could never listen to music while working out, the rhythm never matches my heartbeat or the speed of my repetitions, so it throws me off… I listen to podcasts every time.

Never use the AirPods Pro to listen to music, anyway

I couldn't focus on a podcast while working out.
I would miss most of the things said

 

[tdx]

Question to Lina owners, how does one switch from USB to Ethernet input for music playback? Do you have to manually switch inputs or is it automatic when you activate either source?

Thanks

 

[skyelistener]

I manually select the input required from this screen (select home icon):

 

[GoldenSound]

Question to Lina owners, how does one switch from USB to Ethernet input for music playback? Do you have to manually switch inputs or is it automatic when you activate either source?

Thanks

It automatically switches to network input when you start playing something to it via roon.

But switching to USB you have to do manually

 

[tdx]

Posting this here just in case, if anyone is selling a Lina DAC or knows someone who is, pls pm me.

Thanks