A Warning against Bluesound (CI580v2) for Roon (Angry Customer Rant)

While I don’t agree with the ’Bluesound is trash’ vibe of this post, as a 10 year Bluesound owner I wouldn’t necessarily go there again if I was starting out and intending to use Roon - especially if multi room audio is a big part of your goal.

Two main issues for me have been:

  1. sync - like the original poster I have everything on Ethernet using enterprise LAN gear, and I have been plagued with minor sync issues on and off. Periods where all is good, followed by annoying sync issues. Usually solved by pausing and restarting a song but enough be irritating.

  2. hardware reliability. Over 10 years I’ve had 2 Pulse units die due to bad logic boards (out of warranty of course!) and a Node 2 that suffered the ‘sticky cover issue’ where the rubberised coating decays and becomes a sticky horrible mess - a widespread issue that NAD has refused to honour as a recall out of warranty which has alienated a lot of customers. Just Google ‘sticky Bluesound’.

All in all enough to put me off despite loving the sound and styling of Bluesound gear. I won’t buy any new Bluesound components and will likely gradually phase it out over time. One of the great things about Roon is the freedom to move between vendors for multi room setups!

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