Auralic Aries Mini not appearing as player in Roon

Dear Roon Support,

I subscribed this morning to the two week free trial of Roon, planning to use my Macbook Air as server, Ipad Air as controller, and Auralic Aries Mini (Connected to an Aune S6 Pro Dac) as music player all hooked to my vintage Marantz system. All network devices are connected to the same Wifi network with flawless wifi strength.

After having installed Roon, I was able to reach the SSD mounted inside the Aries Mini upon adding network folder (smb://aural-wma7o8lq). Roon on my Macbook Air started to sort my music library altogether with my Tidal favorites. I was happy that things would go smoothly.

Suddenly no player selected (or something like that) was bleeping on the low side of the window, then went to settings, and the Mini was nowhere to be seen. I downloaded and ran Roon Server, Roon Bridge, but nothing happened. I tried to tweak the settings of the Mini (Roon was shown enabled) as much as I could, restarted everything, but still no music. Interesting, that Roon and Macbook sees the network drive of the Mini without problem, so it is definitely properly hooked to the network, and accessible via Lightning DS, but not with Roon, even I toogled uPnP mode, nothing happened.

After I cancelled my subscription, I received an email from Roon team not to give up, so that’s why I’m here, if there is any solution to this problem. Thanks for the help.

With kind regards,

Zsolt
Hungary, Budapest

Hello @Zsolt_Czimmermann,

Thanks for contacting us regarding this issue and glad to hear you want to give it another shot at setting up Roon! The most common issue that I’ve noticed when audio devices are not showing up as expected is a firewall blocking Roon’s communication somewhere.

I would first make sure that both Roon and RAATServer are added as exceptions to your OSX firewall using these instructions.

Next, I would double check to make sure you don’t have any other antivirus applications or firewall utilities such as Bullguard, McAfee or Little Snitch actively blocking Roon. If you have any of these applications, it would be a good test to verify if there is any change if you temporarily disable them.

If that also does not resolve the issue, can you please let me know what the model/manufacturer of your networking gear is? We have sometimes seen the need to make tweaks to router settings for proper Roon communication and we have a list of known routers with these settings, documented at the end of our Networking Best Practices Guide.

Also, if you can share some screenshots of the issue, that would be helpful in narrowing down possible causes, you can use these instructions to upload screenshots to this Community website. Please let me know when you have had a change to go through my suggestions!

Thanks,
Noris

You need to explicitly turn on ‘Roon Ready’ in the Streamer section of the Mini’s config page that you get to from the web interface or device settings in the Lightning DS app.

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Dear Noris,

Finally, I am able to use Roon. McAffee Small Business Mac Security firewall blocked Roon. As I turned it off, Roon automatically started to work. I am keeping my jaws on the floor as I am noticing a huge improvement on the sound quality of the system, how is that achieved?

However, my DSD files are converted to PCM. Do you recommend to keep it that way or change it somehow?

However, I cannot change the settings of McAffee to let Roon run. Can You recommend a Roon compatible firewall?

I am planning to buy lifetime membership, after what I’ve heard.

Thank You again:

Zsolt

Hi @Zsolt_Czimmermann,

Glad to hear that upon disabling McAfee that everything is working as expected!

Are you certain that there is no way to add Roon.exe and RAATServer.exe as an exception? I have found these instructions which outline how to add exceptions:

It may be a bit different for the small business version of McAfee but the general process should be the same, and you would need to point it to the Roon.exe and RAATServer.exe files located in your Roon Database Directory.

For your DSD question, can you please post a screenshot of your Signal Path? If you go to Roon Settings -> Audio -> Cogwheel icon next to Aires zone -> Device Setup, what does that page look like? Can you share a screenshot? The device setup page should look something like this:

As for your sound quality question, Roon doesn’t improve the sound quality by itself but there are several architectural designs that Roon has implemented that ensures that the audio path is as clean as possible. You can read more about this aspect in our Roon Architecture Documentation and our RAAT Protocol Documentation. Also you might be interested in learning more about our DSP Engine which can further tweak the audio to your liking.

Thanks,
Noris

Dear Noris,

Please find attached my Device Setup menu (on my Language). There is no DSD playback option here unfortunately.

Kind Regards,

Zsolt

Hi @Zsolt_Czimmermann,

Thanks for sharing that screenshot. Since it appears that you have the Auralic in a chain connecting to the aune DAC, I would check the Auralic Web Interface for setting the DSD strategy:

Can you please check there if you have the option of configuring the DSD output?

Thanks,
Noris

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