Beeps between tracks with Qobuz but not with own files

[Ken_Talbot]

Kevin @kevin - it is now tomorrow - in fact 10.15pm in the UK

I have not heard from you

[john (John Iburg)]

Hello @Ken_Talbot,

I’m with the hardware team, Kevin and Dylan reached out to me earlier today and I’ve been performing some tests with our AURALiC hardware in the Roon QA lab today.

Before getting into the details I want to reiterate our commitment to getting this issue resolved for you—irrespective of where any technical faults may lie—so that you can get back to enjoying your time with your music.

During testing today with the AURALiC ALTAIR G1 I’ve been unable to reproduce the issue that you’re reporting with the “beeping” during Qobuz playback.

The fact that this beeping occurs only during Qobuz playback is odd to me. I’m going to provide a quick on how Roon Ready streaming works to help explain this (for simplicity I will describe PCM playback only):

A. When you click “play” on a track the Roon Core will start to buffer the selected track. This means loading the file from local storage or starting to download the FLAC file from the Qobuz or Tidal servers.

B. Once the track has been buffered the Roon Core will start decoding the audio into raw PCM samples (similar to WAV).

C. The raw PCM samples are sent over the network using the RAAT protocol to the endpoint device.

D. The endpoint device takes the incoming raw PCM samples and outputs them to the device’s internal audio driver using its local clock.

RAAT was designed so that the audio endpoint is ignorant of the original source of the audio, it has no idea where the raw PCM samples came from. A local FLAC file will be going through the same decoder as a FLAC file from Tidal or Qobuz. Given that you’ve stated that Qobuz playback does not exhibit these symptoms on other endpoints this absolves the PCM decoder as all endpoints use the same implementation.

So what could be making Qobuz playback different than Tidal or Local playback? Some potential scenarios in order of likelihood are:

A. Sample rate switching bug: Mixed queue Qobuz playback often results in a high number of changes in the sample rate and bit-depth within a playback session. It’s possible that these format switches are causing an issue with the clocking or something else on the AURALiC endpoint and they simply occur more often during Qobuz playback.

B. Endpoint buffering/performance interaction: Because Roon/RAAT decodes all audio to raw PCM (WAV) this results in higher data throughput on the network connection. It’s possible that the higher data throughput is trigger some issue on the endpoint.

C. Race condition: The speed that your Roon Core buffers tracks from Qobuz may be perfectly timed to trigger an issue in the Roon PCM decoder or on the endpoint.

We’re going to reach out to our technical contacts at AURALiC for further assistance with this. Is the email that’s associated with your Roon account the best contact email in case we need to loop you into the discussion?

-John

[Ken_Talbot]

Thank you so much John for your message

I really do enjoy Roon, it’s such a wonderful product, but as you may imagine this issue is rather spoiling it for me

Your message makes sense to me - even though I am not in the least technical

When a Qobuz track starts there are 2 beeps, if I add a Qobuz track to my playlist, there is one beep at the time of adding which is consistent with your explanation

Yes, this email is the best to contact me on

Many thanks for your commitment to resolve this for me

Ken

[Ken_Talbot]

Hello @john @dylan @kevin

I am absolutely delighted to be able to say that the problem is now resolved

I rebooted the ROCK last evening because it was not finding my hard drive

This is the message I received

In fact, this has happened a few times lately - but it eventually does boot up with sufficient patience

So I looked at the settings on my router for the ROCK device - the router had the wrong IP address for the ROCK and was selected to produce random IP addresses. I changed it to be a static IP address and the correct IP and the problem has gone away

Beep free listening at last

I am, of course, totally puzzled by this as I had been listening to Roon/Qobuz beep free for a couple of years.

Maybe some software update had caused the issue?

But the point is - It’s fixed

Many thanks

[john (John Iburg)]

Hello @Ken_Talbot,

Glad to hear you’re back up and running. An odd one, for sure.

I’m going to mark this thread as solved, please don’t hesitate to open up a new one if you encounter the issue again.

-John