Bug? MQA 44khz files and zone groupings

Anyone else seeing this issue? I have some zone groupings that include Realtek audio devices on the computer’s mobo as well as the primary output DAC. There seem to be issues playing 44khz MQA files with this configuration. I get the Audio Transport error message. I’ve seen it on two entirely different systems.

Ungroup the zone and it works fine. But grouped, no playback, specifically only of 44khz MQA.

Hello @James_I,

There are known issues with the Realtek audio driver and audio applications that use the WASAPI audio protocol. Can you try uninstalling the Realtek driver from Device Manager on your PC and seeing if that resolves the issue? We have had a few users report that uninstalling the driver has fixed their issues for them.

-John

Hi John-

Thanks for the suggestion. Happy to try it, but if I uninstall the drivers, how would I use the device? Or are you suggesting just updating to the latest driver?

Hello @James_I,

The device will default to the “Window Generic Audio Driver”. Functionality should be exactly the same, and hopefully it will behave better as well.

-John

Thanks John, I’ll try that. One point: I actually do not listen to the Realtek device for music…I use it to feed to VU meters for a little bling. So sound quality is not key. Is there any DSP type setting, like downsampling, turning off MQA, etc., that would eliminate the error without disabling the drivers for other purposes? This only started happening with the new version of Roon/MQA decoding. It was all fine before, even with MQA files. Something changed with the last version of Roon to trigger this problem.

Hello @James_I,

If you go into Device Setup for the Realtek zone, click “show advanced”, you should turn off the “Enable MQA Core Decoder” option. In addition, you could go into the DSP Engine for the zone, enable Sample Rate Conversion with a custom option, and resample 48, 88.2, and 96 kHz content to 44.1 kHz.

-John

Next time I use this zone I will try these settings, thanks.

I had the same or a very similar problem when I tried to turn on cross-fade in the same zone grouping configuration – i.e. using a Realtek motherboard audio device to output to VU meters as a zone grouped with my main DAC, and got the same “error communicating with audio transport” message (the next file up was MQA).

While you might point to Realtek drivers being difficult, one might argue that Realtek devices are everywhere, and given that this problem only arose with Roon 1.5, I submit that Roon has some debugging to do with 1.5.

This is not to diminish the fantastic accomplishment of integrating MQA decoding while maintaining the play flow so that we don’t have to manually shift any settings to have an
MQA song in the queue play seamlessly. It’s an impressive feat and greatly increases the value of MQA files from Tidal (not having to treat them as a special case). But I think that upgrade came with a few bugs…

Hello @James_I,

We are in complete agreement that the situation with the Realtek driver is subpar, especially given the number of Realtek devices out there in the world. Unfortunately, our developers have made the determination that the Realtek driver itself is the cause of this issue and we are unable to work around it’s limitations. I do not personally have a device with a Realtek chip to test with, however according to most of the user reports on the issue, as well as my knowledge of the Windows audio stack, removing the driver should not cause any regression in performance or functionality.

To that point, the issues with the Realtek driver extend further back than the Roon 1.5 release. Here’s a link to a community search that shows some history on the matter. However, you are correct in that there are features new to 1.5 that make this issue more likely to occur, such as Roon’s MQA Core Decoding.

-John