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

Have owned NAD M10 since introduction to marketplace and ROON for a few years before then. No problem with NAD M10, no problem with Bluesound nor ANY problem with ROON!

I have 2 Bluesband Pulse M set as a stereo pair with a Pulse Sub. I have connected one Pulse M via cable to an old Apple AirPort Express. This AE connects via WiFi to my Orbi WiFi 6 Mesh network. Everything is working perfectly.

Another one here with a house full of Bluesound devices. Node (a couple), Pulse (several) I do get some sync issues when I do multiroom but it’s rare and easily fixed, for me anyway, using the settings/sync adjustment. That said, I so rarely use multiroom if there is a known issue I may just not have faced it.

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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I am both a victim of the CI580 mess – had 2 of them and while they worked fine with Roon at first for quite a while – NAD/BluSound messed them up – I’m not exactly sure why or how – but I had to get rid of them…

But I really did like them when they worked… so I gave NAD/BluSound another chance and now have 8 zones of NAD CI720s, 2 zones of lumin, 1 zone through my Macintosh AV processor and one zone with Dutch & Dutch 8cs. The lumins and nads always played in sync, but because of the delay due to dsp processing in the Mac and D&Ds I had to play with delays on them a bit to get them to sync, but now I can play every zone in sync in my house. The CI720s have worked flawlessly now for a few years with a bunch of software upgrades with no issue.

The idea that NAD/Blusound doesn’t have a full or proper integration of roon or doesn’t play nice with other devices just isn’t true from my perspective and I have a pretty good test case…

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