I’m hoping to for some real world experience to sanity check a system we are designing.
We are looking to replace an existing Sonos system with Roon and Spotify Connect. The system will have 31 roon endpoints which will likely be Bluesound professional units.
At the moment the client can group 13 or so rooms together and they just play all day. He then might have another stream or two going to two or three rooms grouped together somewhere else in the property.
The Bluesound professional equipment looks good and we can group rooms together in their software which would reduce the number of Roon zones but with the scenario above would it count as two or three streams (two or three groups) or would it count as 20 streams (13 endpoints in one group and seven in two others)?
I’ve been looking at servers and the Small Green Computers state “up to six simultaneous zones” and I think that is more powerful than the Roon Titan server.
so TDLR - is an endpoint a roon zone or is a group of endpoints a zone??
I’m very open to ideas if someone has a better way of attacking this! Thanks a lot
The Roon Core knows about the streams it’s actually delivering. For example grouping in Sonos is opaque to it: the Core sees only the stream being sent to the Sonos group coordinator. One would imagine that the same would apply to Bluesound. (You were aware that Sonos devices can already serve as Roon endpoints?)
Hi Mike - thanks for querying that! The Bluestream will act as a Spotify Connect point directly (which should take load of the Roon server when those zones aren’t roon-ing.
Roon treats Sonos devices as separate zones too, assuming of course they’ve been enabled. My point was that if multiple devices are grouped by/to a target endpoint within the Sonos system Roon isn’t aware of the peering arrangement. It just sees the single endpoint receiving the stream.
I’ve done some research and apparently Roon nominates a master unut and then just does clock syncing once for the group rather than each individual zone - so a lot less work.
Wifi as when we had them all wired with ethernet they would randomly switch on wifi one one unit and the network would automatically start disabling ports. The Sonos network stack is really old and not really fit for purpose nowadays.
We have a very good managed Wifi system so the only way to guarantee any form of reliability was to revert them all to Wifi.
Well, this is a configuration issue or a bug in the devices you had and can be fixed.
I suspect that even a good managed wifi may get bogged down if you run 31 separate Roon endpoint zones on it.
Even with 44.1/16 stereo that’s 43 Mbit/s just for the raw data, not counting packet overhead, dropped and resent packets, or backchannel data. True that a good, modern managed wifi has nominally much higher data rates, but you also have to consider that wifi can only send or receive at any one time, not multiplex, and is easily disturbed by other senders in the same frequency band. And Roon is very sensitive to latency and packet drops.
Of course, this multiplies rapidly if you send higher resolutions. (Like close to 300 Mbit/s for 31 separate zones at 192/24)
On the other hand, you would be able to get this down in some configurations if you can send by wifi to a receiver device (so that Roon only sees one zone) and this receiver device multiplexes it to several output devices by Ethernet. But I don’t know if that’s possible in the planned setup.
This sounds suspiciously like the “Spanning Tree” issues that Sonos had/has. @Suedkiez is correct that issues like this with Sonos can be fixed through topology and configuration.
Whatever you do, I strongly encourage you to try to do it over a fully wired network.
I’ve been on this forum for a number of years. I don’t recall any discussions of a Roon install of this size. What you’re doing may or may not be common for professional installs but, if it’s common, this isn’t where people discuss it. You may not get a good answer here.
I believe Sonos tops out at 32 units in a Household. I believe it actually scales ok to that number of devices in any combination of groupings provided that the network supports it. But you do need to be very careful and intentional about how you configure it - wired vs. wifi, your own network vs. their mesh and you need to be careful about not letting it screw around with port enabling via spanning tree because if you’re not, it’ll detect “cycles” because of its own network hijinx and start disabling ports/routes. This means it might work for you.
Roon has different scale characteristics. The Roon server will always stream to every Roon node involved in playback. You can scale the hardware up, but not out, in the sense that at the end of the day, Roon is not a true multi-threaded service. If you decide you want to go with Roon, you’d be be very, very sure that you can predict exactly how many concurrent streams your customer will want because you don’t want to be debugging dropouts and stutters.
You may be saying that you want your nodes to be Bluesound, you want them all to show up in Roon, but you want to train your customer to go to the BlueOS app to group to help with scale. This does not sound like a good idea to me. The usability of this will be very confusing. How does the customer adjust the volume of one of the Bluesound zones in this case? Are you proposing that you train them to flip between the apps depending on whether they are establishing groups, choosing music, adjusting volume? I would question the usability of this system.
My guidance here would be some combination of:
Consider if you really need 31 endpoint devices or if you might be able to solve some of these with a distribution amp
Don’t run away from Sonos yet - you may have been on the right track and you just need to investigate and solve the network issues. Certainly I would recommend that you get to a state where you understand exactly what those issues were, and how well they can be addressed, before you pivot
Consider taking these questions to wherever professional installers huddle to discuss this stuff If there’s a community of people that get this, then reach out.
Consider reaching out to Roon, Bluesound, Sonos, etc. directly to explore what support options are available to you with an installation of this size. Roon’s support is forum only and is best effort. It’s mostly community driven. If you’re accountable for the quality of a professional installation, you may want a phone number to call when things go south. I don’t think you’ll get that from Roon but perhaps they do have some sort of commercial support that I’m not familiar with.
Prioritize the usability of the system. You want your customer to be able to manage groups, play music, manage volume. You want them to be able to use different music sources. Which apps do you want them interacting with and for which of these operations? The end to end system has to be delightful and having to learn how to use several apps (including switching between them) might seriously impact this. Even just having a list of 31 playable zones in Roon sounds questionable to me - that’s a very long list to work through on a mobile phone. So just be sure that you are delivering an experience that they will love and you can be accountable for. Even if this means telling them “We need to reduce the number of zones so let’s think of these two or three as a single zone - can we work with that?”
I hope this helps. This is a big install and it won’t be easy - you’ve already figured that out
I don’t want to take the thread off on a tangent but when we went in to the hidden network config url one of the ports was reporting a WiFi connection so we checked in the app and WiFi was off. We unplugged the port entirely and another one popped up with a WiFi connection. This was very repeatable behaviour.
Sonos doesnt use the latest routing tech and relies on 10 or 15 year old technology so despite having rock solid ethernet and a properly configured network it would randomly switch on WiFi and route traffic that way instead.
The 31 zones are split over multiple WiFi 7 access points (not that it matters as Sonos WiFi chips are too old to use it) and 8 streams per WAP. The WiFi hardly registers the load.
Sonos is ok if you have a couple of zones but scale it up and it’s frankly rubbish, unfortunately.
If there’s a community of people that get this, then reach out.