I have been running Roon for about a year on the same setup (see below). Over the last month when streaming from Tidal the zone I am playing to drops off. This is apparent because the music stops. The zone has disappeared from the Zones tab. It then reappears, sometimes very quickly (seconds), sometimes more slowly (minutes). The music does not restart playing when the zone reappears without the user clicking play. The problem appears to happen in fairy tight time distributions - so for example it may not happen for a few days, then cut out repeatedly every few minutes or less for hours on end (basically unusable at this point).
Restarting Roon or the core or the DAC or the bridge has no impact. The problem is a NEW problem and there have been no changes to the system.
Setup is an intel NUC running Roon ROCK connected via ethernet to a TP Link 8 port Gigabit smart switch which in turn is connected via ethernet to main internet router and to Auralic Aries. The Aries takes the Roon ethernet feed and feeds it to a Theta DAC via EBU cable. Controls include the Roon app running on a MAC Book Pro, a PC, two Android phones and an iMac all connected via wireless to the same router.
Would like to clear this up as the system is unusable,
Thanks for contacting support, I have a few other questions as to provide better troubleshooting here:
Can you please provide the model/manufacturer of your Router and switch model?
Does this issue affect all of your zones or only the Auralic Aires?
Does this issue affect only TIDAL content or Local Content as well?
Do you notice this issue only when switching sample rates or does it happen irregardless of sample rates?
Do other zones other than the Aires work as expected without issues?
Is your Aires using the latest firmware as @wizardofoz mentions?
I have gone ahead and enabled diagnostics mode for your account and what this action will do is next time your Core is active, a set of logs will automatically be generated and uploaded to our servers for analysis. I kindly ask for you to note the exact local time in your country (ex. 12:05PM) that this issue occurs so that I can take a look at the diagnostics recieved around that time.
Please let me know the above information when possible and we can continue from there.
This morning, my Auralic zone was gone and would not come back. I decided to follow Mr Fix It and update the firmware. Following this (and the hard reboot) the zone reappeared on my Roon. I played the new Mumford album. The system was idle until I went to play something else just now (5.56) and the Auralic zone is now gone again.
Hopefully my logs will shed some light on what is happening.
…and just stopped playing (I assume it dropped out, then came back in the minutesit took me to get to the control) at about 1725pm Fri 16th Nov UK time.
Hi MrFI,
Thanks for your feedback. I updated the network bridge which is the device dropping off from Roon, which happens whether the DAC is on or off. Did not solve the problem but thanks for input,
Thank you for letting me know the timestamp and that you have updated the firmware on your Aires. I can confirm that we have received the diagnostics from your Core and I have submitted them to QA for analysis. While this case reaches their queue, can you please let me know your answers to my previous questions?
Also, it may be worthwhile to try using another Ethernet cable that connects to the Aires just to rule out the possibility of a bad Ethernet cable. I will be sure to update you once I have received feedback from QA regarding this issue, I appreciate your patience until then.
On your other questions, my internet setup is a Virgin Media router taking 150MBS optical fibre. It acts as a modem only and passes internet to a Linksys WRT1900 ACS which acts as the main router. It broadcasts on 2.4 and 5GHZ. The control devices for Roon link on both these frequencies. The router is ethernet connected via CAT 6 cable to a TP Link 8 port gigabit smartswitch model TL-SG108E. There is also a slave router (same brand and model) in this chain to give coverage throughout the house.
It is only the Auralic Aries that has the drop off problem.
I am not using local content, just Tidal.
All sample rates. Happens in an album of the same sample rate for each track.
The sonos zones do not appear to drop off.
At present, the system is acting like it is being paused all the time, this time the zone is staying but the music stops.
I appreciate your patience here while I got some feedback from the QA team. They have noted that this issue is due to something happening on the network, specifically we are seeing traces that the Aires DAC is not accepting the connection from the Core due to a networking cause.
With that said, I would like to propose a test here. Can you please try temporarily connecting your DAC and ROCK directly to the router and bypass the switch? If the issue subsides when the DAC and ROCK are connected without the switch in the equation, then that gives a good data point on where to investigate further.
Please let me know if you are able to perform this test and your findings after doing so.
Thanks for the reply. I can do as requested, although will have no access to TIDAL as neither the ROCK or the Auralic Aries (which by the way is not a DAC but a network bridge that feeds my DAC, although it is the Roon endpoint so I guess this does not matter) is then connected to the internet or indeed my network, so I am not sure how I can control Roon in this case as I do so over my network.
All I could do is stream local stored music then (USB or NAS attached to the ROCK), which I can do, but it is on Tidal that the issue is happening. Do you want me to proceed anyway?
Bear in mind that my setup worked perfectly until recently.
I am not sure if I follow your questions. Maybe I am missing a detail of your setup here?
If you connect your Aires and ROCK directly to the LAN ports on your Linksys WRT1900 ACS Router, and then use a Roon Remote via WiFi (also connecting also to your Linksys Router), you should still have internet access to both the ROCK and the Roon Remote and be able to stream TIDAL.
If you are able to perform this test, we can rule out a possible cause of this issue (the switch). Please let me know if you are able to perform this test.
Yeah, Sorry Noris, what you didn’t know is that the router is miles away, hence the switch…I may be able to connect them directly into the slave router - would this suffice? The slave has the same SSID as the main router.
Yes that would be a good test. The takeaway here is I just want to rule out the switch in case there is an issue with it preventing the connections from taking place. For your slave router, does it have it’s own subnet or is the primary router handling all the DHCP connections?
A few other things you can also try: Replacing the Ethernet cable connecting the Aires to the router and verifying that you don’t have Multicast filtering turned on for the Linksys Router. Have you made any firmware updates to your Linksys recently? Or have you added a firewall anywhere that could be causing issues?
Please let me know your results to the above test when possible.
The slave router is set up as a Bridge router (an option in the Linksys software settings) which I believe relegates DHCP connections to the primary router. Filter multicast is off as an option on the primary router.
Firmware is set to update automatically and the router is on the current version. I do not know when the latest update may have been. I have not added a firewall anywhere, but there is a new Apple MacPro in the house that can serve as a control but is rarely used as such.
I have altered the setup as you requested and the Auralic appeared as an AudioZone on Roon without having to reboot it. It went from not appearing as a zone to appearing as one by only unplugging it from the switch and connecting directly to router. Nothing was rebooted. I guess this does point to an issue on the network with the switch, although other devices taking the internet from the switch (TV, SKY box) continue to function without a problem.
The change was made at about 11am today. I will run the system as is for the moment and see if I experience any dropouts again. If not, then I suppose the switch appears to be the culprit. I would like understand why, and what can be done to solve this as the current setup involves a cable run that can only be temporary - I really need a switch in the chain to accommodate my existing cable setup.
Thanks for you help so far - at least for the moment I have music again,
Glad to hear that the system has stabilized a bit without the switch in the equation. Please let me know if you experience any other issues and if you do, please note the local time in your country if an issue occurs and let me know.
If we can narrow down the issue to the switch, then replacing it would probably be a good idea. The other devices connected to the switch may not make use of the same amount of bandwidth that you use to stream hi-res content or something may be blocking multicast from operating properly on that switch.
Just an update for you. I brought the switch back into the chain, but replaced the 2 ethernet cables relevant to the audio chain with new cables. I have not had any drop outs since doing this, so I think the culprit was one or both of the old cables (which had not been used when the switch was out of the chain).
Thanks for letting me know @John_Tucholski! Happy that you localized the issue to the cables themselves and everything seems stable now. Thanks again for contacting support and hope you have a continued great listening experience!