Bridged Ethernet - Roon stops working

Hi,

I’ve been meaning to try this for a while and finally got around to it last night with some interesting results. I run Roon Core on an i5-7600 3.5mhz quad core machine with 16gb ram and gtx 1030 gpu. It’s a dedicated machine for Roon only and it generally runs fine. Main rig is centred around a Devialet Expert Pro and is in the same room as the PC running core. The PC has two ethernet ports.

So last night I bridged the connections and ran a crossover cable directly into the Devialet. All worked fine. Previously both PC and Devialet had been connected via a simple 8 port switch shared with other devices in the AV rack. Aside from simple curiosity, my main reason for trying this is that I sometimes experience static when listening to music if there’s a lot of other stuff going on in the network. So I figured a dedicated connection Roon PC => Devialet couldn’t hurt.

However, this morning I realised that my Roon Remote on my ipad was loading art really slowly and I couldn’t play anything on any of my other endpoints (Sonos, Blusound, Airplay). They would attempt to play but after a few seconds would fall over either by skipping to the next track or losing control of the transport. Removing either Ethernet adaptor from the bridge or connecting to Core using the PC’s (normally disabled) wifi both fixed the issue.

I’d really like to be able to make this configuration work, and I’m sure it’s an issue with how I’ve configured the bridge rather than with Roon. But while I’m techy enough, I’m not a networking expert so hoping someone on here can help me figure this out.

Many thanks.

Hello @Mark_Higgins,

As long as the direct ethernet connection between the Devialet and PC allowed for the device to be discovered as well as playback to happen, I would think the issue would lie in how the PC is handling the extra network traffic initiated by the Devialet. The symptoms you are describing are almost always related to performance issues on the Core machine. You certainly have a powerful enough computer that this shouldn’t be an issue, however direct ethernet connections with multi-cast devices can interact with a whole host of things on a system, sometimes even at the hardware level.

As to the crackling you were hearing during playback to the Devialet zone connected to the switch, I would recommend trying increasing the buffer size in the “Device Setup” screen for the Devialet zone. There’s no harm in using the maximum value of 5000ms, I would start there.

-John

Hi @john

Thanks. But that’s not it. I’ve been working a bit more on this and it seems there’s a known issue with Win10 that first arose in build 1709 and has not yet been resolved. Upload speeds are basically crippled - see attached speedtest results. This is certainly what I’ve experienced even with the Devialet in standby. Unbridging the adaptors resolves the upload speed issue, but obviously ends any connectivity to from the PC direct to the Devialet. So this is a Windows and not a hardware issue.

Anyway, I guess I’ll abandon the direct connection for now and go back to using a switch. I’ll increase the buffer size and see if it deals with the crackling.

Many thanks
Mark

I’m getting 88 Mbps upload with the latest Windows 10 build. I’ve read that some have fixed the issue by turning off IPv6, or removing/updating drivers, or removing network enhancement software like the Asus Turbo network software that comes with its motherboards.