Bad sound quality with Roon [Resolved, Ethernet Switch]

Wow! A classic truth, if such a thing exists! :smiley:

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Hi Anders

Yes I’m danish, but lived in Ohio in a short period 7 year ago.

I did try the difference between ssd und a spinning disk both for Roon core and storage and I can’t hear any difference. I’m using both enterprise hdd and ssd in my nas.

Hehe the DS918+ lives to fight another day as Core. I knew it wasn’t the issue.

So it sounds great after following Roon’s guidelines - Core outside the listening room and connected to the router.

Which model switch was it? The router itself has a switch inside it, so it’s not a general thing that switches are bad. But maybe there was just some strange thing with your particular one. Unmanaged switch or mamaged? I know you don’t care about the switch anymore but I’m curious!

Happy listening.

Hi Sean

Hehe Yes roon lives a bit longer.

The switch in my bacement ist a Brand new as this:

The other one Is old negear 5 Port Gigabit

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No worries.

You should add [Resolved] to your thread title.

Beat you to it @Thomas_Larsen. It’s my favourite thing to do :yum:

Glad you were able to track this down. It’s certainly something to keep in mind when thinking about Network connections.

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Was the problem related to TP-LINK switch, or Netgear switch, or both?

I was just about to buy the same TP-LINK switch… but now I’m having doubts :slight_smile:

I suspect you can have solved the problem with the switch simply by ground the negative line of the power supply. Look here:

and here:

Only sure to work with the switches John has tested though - not positive to work with other switches like Thomas has.

So per the posts you linked, for anyone else reading this, get the NetGear GS105 or GS108 to do these grounding tricks.

And this is also assuming this was a leakage current issue but I’m not so sure - the exact same path/chain (hardware) didn’t cause any issues in Lumin UPnP mode.

Just some thoughts. We are definitely digging in the weeds of unknowns here though but fun for tinkerers like me :slight_smile:

Hi
Problem was with both TP and netgear

Actually with the nas and router connected in the basement they are connected without grounding!
This is cause The power cables (like always) are with schuko plugs and in Denmark we have EU in wall.

I do have schuko with an separate ground connection in my Listening room though.

So I’m interested in testing if grounding the nas and router will make a difference… this I will post as soon as I get the alps for the fiber box.

Whether in UPNP or Roon mode, the electrical grounding conditions of the Lumin remains the same, so why would there be a change in one mode but not the other?
The switch you replaced could be treating the two streams differently due to some traffic flow control though. How could Roon indicate ‘bit perfect’ if this was the case though?

Think you can trust your ears?
The McGurk effect try it and see if your ears are fooled?

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Ha this was cool.

Maybe it could be the amount of data passing through the switch? That’s the only thing I can think of.

As that is a Gbit switch, seems unlikely. Again, I would expect Roon to give some sort of error message (audio file loading slowly? or similar) if it was having trouble moving the bits quickly enough. The bits are transferred error free remember, so the network between the source and destination shouldn’t matter so long as there is sufficient throughput to keep the buffer full enough/prevent it emptying.

Why would that differ significantly (read: at all) between UPnP and Roon unless you are streaming different formats?

Because UPnP is moving files and Roon is doing the decoding and whatnot on the core. Thus I would expect that they are streaming different formats.

If the formats are different all bets are off.
The explanation lies elsewhere IMHO. :slight_smile:

It may be possible to equalise the audio formats. I thought that Roon always streamed PCM (WAV?), so if you use the same WAV file as source, you may end up with PCM going over the network to the Lumin for both Roon and UPNP? Network protocols may be different though, which is where the switch may have an influence if it treats them differently (and of course how the Lumin treats them on receipt).