I have a variety of Chromecast audio devices with powered speakers and a couple of Nest Audio speaker pairs. They have all worked well with Roon, which I’ve streamed individually, but I’ve had very inconsistent results when streaming as a group. I’ve reset, reinstalled, and reconfigured the groups and the devices multiple times. It would seem to work for a while and then suddenly stop.
Then tonight, everything seemed to be working again. I have a group with a Chromecast audio plugged into an analog speaker pair, another plugged into a digital pair, and a set of paired Nest Audio. It covers our main floor. Then, out of the blue, a new song started and the stream dropped. It continued on the analog speaker pair, but no sound out of the digital pair and the Nest Audio speaker were cutting in and out.
And it hit me that the song that started playing was 96khz 24bit. Chromecast audio only supports 48khz digital out. I had applied downsampling to the standalone instance, but not to the groups that the digital speaker pair was part of.
I applied my max 48Khz downsampling DSP configuration to the group and immediately all the speakers sprang to life. I feel like such a moron!
I think this may be what was happening to me but I am a super remedial user of Roon, though I bought a lifetime so have time to figure it out I guess. Where do I access the settings you are referring to? Through a single source it works flawlessly, but when I try chromecast groups it stops and starts.
Likely the best option is to go to “Settings” “Audio” and then click on the cog for each relevant end point device to open its “Device setup” in which you scroll down and click “Show advanced” to finally be able to set “Max sample rate” to 48kHz.
Hmmm Roon sets all my cc devices by default to their supported rate don’t have to set anything and you should not have to. Roon only sends hires streams to devices that identify themselves as supporting hires with a specific metadata tag. Without this present Roon will automatically downsample content to 48/24. Also all mine will downsample 48/24 if fed a non compatible stream using Roon or any other software . This is on a wide variety of devices from my Naim Uniti Atom, JBL Link and My TV and Nvidia Sheild TV box. Does this behaviour change in a group as I never actually group them?
This could well be related to bandwidth as the WiFi was not the best in those devices.
I have issues with my original CCA puck suffering occasional drop outs at 24/96 where as other devices like my Bluesound PowerNode works perfectly in the same spot.
I have also seen this on grouped Sonos devices and I have set those to 16/44 where everything then works perfectly.
But I guess the issue here is the op is using it digital out to speakers and these most likely don’t support 96/24. Being optical Roon won’t know nor the CC that the ongoing device doesn’t support 96/24 and that’s why it’s bombing out as it’s getting a sample rate it doesn’t support but the cc does. Something you don’t get with USB as it communicates two ways spdif is one way street.
I used the DSP settings, created a preset that converts to either (44.1khz or 48khz depending on what the original rate is evenly divisible by) and the enable “Sample rate conversion” for each Chromecast group.