Argon Solo Woes

Roon Core Machine

Rock running on a NUC7i5
Rock and remotes on build 1160 earlyaccess.

Networking Gear & Setup Details

Fritzbox 7590, wired roon core, wireless to Argon Solo. The Solo feeds analogue signal to a pair of active speakers.

Connected Audio Devices

A bunch of Raspberry Pi’s, both wired and wireless, two Sonos devices (wireless), Argon Solo (wireless)

Number of Tracks in Library

94430 Tracks on 6963 albums

Description of Issue

Up until sunday, all worked fine and flawlessly. Now, roon has trouble playing to my Argon Audio Solo.
The dreaded “Starting audio playback on your device, this may take a moment” appears. The moment takes between a few seconds and forever. In other words, it’s really hit and miss if playback starts at all. If playback starts, it may continue without problems or stop randomly. Restarting doesn’t work. The little star thingy appears, the playback indicator changes to a square, but the time stays at 00:00, no sound. Then, after a few seconds, playback stops again (the square changes to the triangle).

This happens both with streamed and local content. I rebooted my whole network gear, rock and the Solo several times, to no avail.

Funny thing: the Solo is roon ready. If I switch to airplay, it seems to be more stable. Still shaky, but less error prone.
This doesn’t happen with any other endpoints in my house, only with the Solo.

Is my Solo dying (which would be a damn shame!) or did roon make an oopsie?

It sounds like a wifi issue. Has something changed in your environment recently (e.g. new neighbours using the same wifi channels)? What happens if you move the Solo to some other spot in your environment, or change the wifi channels on your Fritz!box?

Nothing changed. It’s not a Wifi Issue, I can play to a pi on the same network at the same position than the Solo without any problems. The devices are 3m and a wall away of the Fritzbox. I can access the Solo in a browser. The rest of my audio network works as intended.

Some new development: The Solo now tends to disappear randomly from roon, but only from the RAAT section in Settings - Audio. It shows up as airplay device, can be enabled and played to. Playback via Airplay works as intended, starts instantly and is stable.
A reboot of the Solo fixes this most of the time, but usually not for long.

If I try to play to it via RAAT (if it’s not gone MIA), playback is more miss than hit. It’s kind of the Sonos issue all over again, only with added playback inconsistency.

I’ll try and contact Argon Audio for a chance of a firmware reflash or similar. Maybe the next iteration of roon works flawlessly again. Who knows? I switched to a raspberry pi with a dac hat for the time being, but having the Solo work as before would be a huge plus.

EDIT: if playback starts on the Solo (after displaying “Starting playback on your audio device…”), it stops randomly with “Roon lost control of the audio device because the input was switched”. This happens without me changing (read: touching) anything.

OK, I may have changed something. “Enable Core Decoder” was enabled for MQA in device settings. A reset to defaults toggled this option off. I don’t know if it’s connected, but I can playback reliably (local and streamed content) since the reset. Right now, I’m too afraid to turn it back on for troubleshooting purposes :wink: Didn’t play any MQA content, though.
Still, if that’s the culprit (which atm it seems to be, everything seems to be back to normal in the last couple of minutes), I’m unsure if roon should behave that way if this option is enabled.

EDIT: kind of partial success…starting playback still sometimes takes several tries. At least the connection seems to be stable once playing.

My luck seems to have run out. I updated Roon core and remotes to the latest versions (1164), and after installation, the RAAT version of the Solo is AWOL again. Airplay to the solo is fine.
A reboot of the Solo brought it back, but starting playback is still shaky. Back to square one. Sigh.

Hi there

I’m experiencing similar issues with the Argon Solo device.

I just got two of these a couple of weeks ago and they both showed the issues from the start.
Streaming from Tidal they are running relatively stable. However, I have had the disappearing you describe 5-10 times these past two weeks. They keep working as Chromecast and Airpaly devices. Only way to get them back in RAAT is to recycle the power.

I have also seen the “Starting audio playback on your device, this may take a moment” multiple times.

Another issue I have is streaming Live Radio via RAAT to the Argons. Playback just stops after 10 - 30 minutes. This happens every single time i try.
It could be interesting to see if you could reproduce this issue…

I also reached out to Argon support but they haven’t replied.

1 Like

Hey, thanks for chiming in.
My Solo worked great from the start, without any issues. The behavior describe started out of the blue.

After many a resets of audio and networking gear, the Solo seems to be stable atm with local files and qobuz streams. Playback mostly starts without “starting playback on your device”. It still sometimes does it.

Live radio is a big problem, still. It shows the same behavior you describe. I can listen to local and qobuz content for some time, switch to live radio, and most of the time (though not every time), the Solo refuses to play. Playback doesn’t start, even with multiple tries, giving me the “starting audio playback on your device”-message. I can’t switch back to different content either, the Solo just stops reacting, like in a race condition. I can’t switch it off out of roon, either.

For clarity, this only happens in RAAT. I can switch back and forth to and from live radio just fine using airplay.

I didn’t yet observe if playback of live radio stops after some time, as I now tend to use the aforementioned pi for live radio duties exclusively. I’ll investigate later.

I reached out to support, too, but haven’t had a reply either.

Where did you find the relevant logs?

Well, I’m running the Roonserver and it installs and run in signs-in user profile.
So logs are located here C:\Users[userprofile]\AppData\Local\RoonServer\Logs

But I guess you are running Roonrock on your NUC, which I believe runs as a service so log files would be at a different location. I would guess something like
C:\Program Files\RoonRock\Logs
C:\ProgramData\RoonRock\Logs
C:\Program Files\RoonServer\Logs
C:\ProgramData\RoonServer\Logs
But just guessing…

i forgot about the Win10-part when I was at the end of my post, sorry!

EDIT:
In the meantime, I found the relevant logs on my Roon core, they are indeed in roonserver/logs

Hi,
I was thinking if we are running same firmware version on the Argons.
Both of mine are running version p15245.125.0

Have you noticed if yours have been updated while you had it?
Apparently they should update automatically.

p15245.125.0 it is.

Where did you find information about automatic updates?
I assumed the presence of a dedicated ‚flash Firmware‘ button to be an indication of the contrary, meaning a manual reflash is necessary if there‘s a new firmware.

Bingo. About 30 Minutes of live radio

12/04 16:04:07 Info: [cast] lost device CastDevice[DeviceId=SOLO-e3d943d41020c77481541ccd0ce61524._googlecast._tcp.local, Name=Argon Audio SOLO, Address=192.168.178.54] because it disconnected

No sleep timer set.

After this disconnect, the Solo still shows up but I can’t start playback on the device.
Something’s definitely broken. @support, any, help here?

EDIT:
since then, playback is back to more miss than hit, and stops after a few seconds. The Solo disappears from roon (“Select audio zone”), only to reappear shortly thereafter. Playback of streamed or local media remains broken.

Man! They diffidently have an issue going on here! This is totally reproducible.
Thanks for confirming this.
About the auto-update, I think it was something i read somewhere. I’ll see if I can find where.

except that it isn’t. :frowning: This morning, I listened to 1,5h of live radio on the solo without any problems.
But knowing my power of jinxing, it will fail 30 seconds after posting this :wink:

Yeah, that’s a long time. I think my record is 35 min.
Maybe I should test it again. I’m using it as AirPlay endpoint when listening to radio.

The last days, playback of local and streamed files via RAAT is stable. So I tried live radio. A local station, mp3-stream, so not much data. The Solo lost connection after less then 5 seconds. I tried a second time. Same result. Back to the pie…

News from Argon Audio:

" We have identified an issue with the Roon live radio implementation in our SOLO product, and are working on providing a firmware fix ASAP.
Until that is ready, please refrain from using the live radio functionality in Roon on your SOLO product, as it seems to also generally destabilize the performance of the product.
We are very sorry for this inconvenience, but promise that this live radio issue has top priority with us."

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