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!
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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 itâs 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 donât agree with the âBluesound is trashâ vibe of this post, as a 10 year Bluesound owner I wouldnât 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:
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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.
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hardware reliability. Over 10 years Iâve had 2 Pulse units die due to bad logic boards (out of warranty of course!) and a Node 2 that suffered the âsticky cover issueâ 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 âsticky Bluesoundâ.
All in all enough to put me off despite loving the sound and styling of Bluesound gear. I wonât 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 â had 2 of them and while they worked fine with Roon at first for quite a while â NAD/BluSound messed them up â Iâm not exactly sure why or how â but I had to get rid of themâŚ
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 doesnât have a full or proper integration of roon or doesnât play nice with other devices just isnât true from my perspective and I have a pretty good test caseâŚ
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I also can not agree. I think it is a bit special to say âDon´t buy this brandâ. I would buy it again.
3 Blueos devices und one Yamaha. The one worst device is the yamaha MusicCast 50 speaker, which often needs a restart to be found in roon or in its own yamaha IOS app.
NAD M33, NAD M10v2 and Pulse Mini are working without any problems. Grouped or separated.
The only thing, that is not fixed on M33 and M10 since years ist playing 88kHz files without compiling up or down.
When you pay for a premium product like the CI580v2 you expect features to work.
I have a solidly very premium ethernet infrastructure at my home, and I donât use WIFI, so having general bugs such as not being able to start music / general stops or not playing in sync is just not okay⌠it makes the whole system quite useless.
I have been trying various devices since 2019 from Bluesound and had various issues with all of them⌠at times things have worked, but then again it went bad⌠Their firmware updates have been risky at best.
Currently, I only use these CI580v2, and from what I can tell, no one has them working 100% flawlessly with Roon, even when theyâre âRoon Readyâ. Those who seem to protect Bluesound in this thread has other devices⌠For me, as of today, they work âsomewhat okâ but still go out of sync frequently, which is just not cool. They seem a bit more reliable lately, but today for example I canât start a group of zones together. Had to ungroup one or two of the zones to get things playingâŚ
Bluesound doesnât invest heavily into reliability when it comes to Roon, and Roon doesnât seem to care too much as Iâve never had anyone here from them comment either on the issues. I guess itâs hard for Roon to âfix all problemsâ for third party suppliers, but at least they should be hard on the certificationsâŚ
I am just throwing out this thread as a word of warning, as I think thereâs plenty of other Brands and devices that works great and doesnât come with these potential issues. If youâre willing to take the risk, go with Bluesound, but donât expect any support or help if things doesnât work.
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I have an M33 in my living room and a Powernode in my kitchen dining area and it is almost unusable synced in roon.
After a few tracks the sync falls and I have to pause it for a few seconds to resync and this will go on and repeat every few tracks.
This has been going on for a few years and only started after a BluOS update - I have a Raspberri Pi end point in my office and this syncs fine, it is only the BluOS products that donât play nice.
Of course I can run the BluOS app and set up the zone in that but that has limitations and defeats the primary purpose that Roon offers across different platforms.
Blusound tech support has been worse than useless, they take weeks to answer and every time it is a new tech asking the same questions as the last.
For this reason, I am removing all BluSound/NAD products from my setuo when I build my new house, was going to add M23 to drive a new pair of B&W 804d4 but now moving to Michi and dedicated streamer, also reviewing options for the wider end points in powered zones.
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Daft question maybe but would this sync issue prevent Roon certifying a product and if so, if a sync issue becomes apparent post certification, why isnât Roon certification revoked? Until itâs fixed âŚ
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A question that has been asked beforeâŚsadly Bluesoundâs failures are longstanding and I guess thereâs neither appetite nor resource to police failed firmware updates - various items linked off my previous post here:
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I purchase a Bluesound NODE about 18 months ago. Used it as streamer/dac and preamp (rca split adapter to phonostage (MM). Was never very good as preamp. After a year i ungraded streamer/dac to Orchard Audio PecanPI+ and Schitt Freya+ preamp. 100% improvement. NODE went to a friend in another state, where installed with new Nucleus and 2 Pulse speakers (connected Ethernet) and 2 Pulse Miniâs. Could never get Pulse Miniâs (wireless) to be recognized by ROON. Bluos did show them. Tech support from Bluesound was the same as previous posts. Weeks if not months to say: âjust use Bluos/ROON problemâ. The speakers do sound pretty good. In hindsight a company that wants to resurrect MQA as a standard doesnât deserve to be ROON Ready.
Until reading this thread, I never knew about the NAD CI580. Looking at what that device does, Iâd bet that CI580 would be a likely culprit for having issues with Roon. Zones, and synchronization. There is a lot of software/firmware complexity there. Complexity in any system begets problems. It seems to me that running CAT 6 cables to separate Roon endpoints is a much more simple and manageable solution.
That being said, it sounds like NAD/Bluesound does not have the best technical support. That is reason enough to migrate to something else.
Other than the NAD CI580v2, are there no other multizone single chassis solutions for using Roon?
There is the NAD 720 which is a unit where you can mount multiple in a special rack - although thatâs also NAD / Bluesound - so perhaps not risk free.
I think quite a few of us have improvised :-
- Multiple single zone integrated solutions (Ropiee with amp HAT, Wiim AmpâŚ)
- Multiple single zone live level units (eg Ropiee with HAT, Wiim) with multi zone amplifiers
- Whirl do a box that has a roon core, plus 4 stereo line level zones, which you can combine with a multi zone amplifier
I considered NAD - but didnât like the forum comments I was reading - so ended up with a mix of 1 and 2.
I use Home Assistant to add some to add some remote keypads and power integration (so things turn on and off when they should).
But a single multi-zone roon ready box with amps and remote key pads would be great!
Maybe Harman will do somethingâŚ
Iâm beginning to think the best option may be to get a bulk standard distribution amplifier and add a Wiim Pro Plus to each zone as the controller.