I just got a FiiO M17. I’ve got it up and running with Roon and am happy with the sound quality and UI but I have one big disappointment with it and that’s WiFi connection stability. I like to be wireless when I’m listening to headphones so that I can get up from my sofa to go to the fridge, visit the bathroom, go and fetch something from another room or whatever without having to pause my music. The devices I’ve used so far are an iPhone running Roon Remote (paired to noise cancelling headphones when I’m on my balcony that overlooks a road), a Hugo2/2Go combo and now the M17. With the M17 I feel as if I’ve stepped back about 18 months in time.
My time-slip is because in the old days both my iPhone/Roon-Remote and my Hugo2/2Go combos would have issues when I moved between mesh point. Neither were very good at handling the presumably quite brief latency blip as a handoff occurred from one mesh point to another, either skipping multiple tracks or thinking the end point had gone off line entirely and stopping playback until I re-selected the audio zone. For both devices however the situation has improved a lot over the last 18 months and now my iPhone pretty much never has an issue transitioning between mesh points. An issue with my Chord combo is still more frequent than on my iPhone but is now also quite rare.
Not so for my new FiiO M17 however; it just cannot handle a mesh transition and pretty much always thinks that the Roon endpoint (FiiO’s Roon native app) has powered off so the music stops dead and I have to go back into Roon remote to reselect the M17 endpoint (which is always seen as back online by the time I get the M17 out of my pocket to fix things).
I’ll be posting my issue on the FiiO forums but I’m wondering whether other FiiO users are having similar issues or whether anyone can suggest any settings that might help. Maybe the WiFi on the M17 is really bad or perhaps it’s a software issue. It’s interesting to me that the other RAAT clients that I use (Roon’s own and the Chord one) seem to be OK now, and also interesting that my Chord combo was initially pretty horrible but is now pretty much OK.
Do RAAT clients have any flexibility in terms of the size of their client-side buffer size or is that limited due to the requirement for multi-endzone sync? Maybe it’s as simple as asking FiiO to increase the buffer size. If there are RAAT limitations due to the requirement to support multi-room playback then I really wish that a headphone (single endpoint only) mode could be added to the specification because thinking an endpoint has gone off line simply because of the latency blip from a mesh point handover really doesn’t seem to me to be acceptable.
Really sorry to hear you’re having problems with the M17.
I too use one around the home, but don’t have a MESH system. My home is small enough to use a single ASUS RT-AC86U router, which works perfectly with the M17 for me.
Maybe it’s the MESH system that’s upsetting it?
I would post your feedback on the following forum, addressed to @FiiO
FiiO tend to be pretty responsive to queries/problems on there.
I have the M11 and it has zero trouble with me moving about the house using my UniFi multiple access points system. Infact it’s one of the first thing I noticed how robust it is compared to other stuff I tried. Handover roaming can be an issue on some Wi-Fi systems mesh or otherwise.
Thanks for the replies. It’s definitely the mesh system that’s upsetting it since it only drops the endpoint when I move around my house. When I’m sitting still on the sofa it’s never once dropped the connection.
Interesting that you @CrystalGipsy don’t have an issue since our mesh systems are both from the same manufacturer (Ubiquiti) although mine is their Alien series.
I’ll definitely report it on that Head-Fi forum with the FiiO tagging. Thanks for that suggestion @Martin_Kelly
If you have the option in the amplifi range try looking for setttngs for bss transition and fast roaming an UAPSD (sometimes it’s called Wi-Fi power saving). Fast roaming is known to cause issues with hardware if it doesn’t support it. Androids network stack can be very picky I have found over the years. For me it’s worked fine with all these on or off mind. But not sure how the Amplifi range work.
FYI I haven’t had success with mesh wifi either so I suspect it’s that rather than the FiiO.
I don’t have the FiiO but I have a Hiby and 2Go.
Both tend to drop the music if I move between mesh points (with Roon or DLNA etc.).
And also, I don’t have cell service where I live so I use wifi calling.
If I’m on a call (iPhone 13) the call drops when I move between mesh points.
I eventually gave up on mesh and got a more robust router that can cover my entire home.
I have Amplifi Alien routers as well, configured as one router and two wired endpoints. I listen to headphones over Roon on an Astell & Kern SP 2000, which suffered the same inability to smoothly handle the transition between endpoints. I pretty much solved the problem by setting up a separate 5 ghz network on the Alien and operating the A&K on that network only. . Seems the issue was that the A&K would default to the 2.4 ghz band which is much more prone to interference from neighbors’ cell phones and the like. You might give it a try.
I use an M11 Plus on a UniFi network with multiple access points. I don’t have issues moving between access points when using the M11 as a Roon Ready endpoint.
I had serious issues with a Chord Mojo 2 + Poly. Same with an iBasso using the Android Roon Remote client. I could not get either of those devices to behave well.
All of my endpoints are wired, so I’m not reliant on multi-hop mesh capabilities. My access points support mesh/wireless backhaul, but I have that disabled.
This is good advice. On UniFi gear, many people disable these settings in home and corporate environments. If these settings exist on your Amplifi gear, try playing with them.
This is also good advice! With the UniFi range, you can not only set up any number of WiFi networks, but you an also specify which access points participate in which network. Anything you can do to create a custom WiFi network targeted at your FiiO device might help.
I’ll just reiterate that the M11 Plus has been the most rock solid mobile access point I’ve used. On UniFi, you can enable notifications when devices roam between access points and I’ve done this to watch the activity of the M11 as it transitions. Never a single hiccup for me, so there’s something about your setup - high latency, unreliable wireless backhaul, being on 2.4GHz, or something else that’s causing challenges. I hope you figure it out!
Thanks for the additional responses and good advice. I’ve been away for a few days so not in a position to mess around any further hence the delayed response.
It’s interesting to hear people’s differing experiences with Chord stuff. I have both the original Mojo/Poly combo and a Hugo2/Chord2Go combo and I actually find both of them significantly better than my FiiO M17 in terms of cooperating with my mesh system and when I’m running the Roon Remote on my iPhone that is absolutely 100% rock solid and never misses a beat when transitioning across my mesh points so I do think FiiO might want to look to see if there is any room for improvement on its end as I will suggest to them when I get round to making the necessary posts.
For now I think I’m going to set up an additional 5GHz SSID dedicated to my M17. Initially I’ll set that up on my main router only since I don’t tend to roam the whole house when using the FiiO and I might always be close enough to the main router to be able to stayed tied to that which would get around any mesh transition issues completely. If I do need to bring one or more of my other mesh points into the picture then I can very easily do that. As suggested I do wonder whether tying the M17 to 5GHz might help since I did notice in my initial tests that as the M17 moved between mesh points it would sometimes jump from 5GHz to a 2.4GHz channel and then back to 5GHz on the next transition so I wonder if that might have been what increased the latency of a handover enough to glitch the system. That problem can never occur on my Chord stuff since Chord Electronics only supports 2.4GHz WiFi (which I think is a pretty poor show for such expensive gear, along with still using micro-USB rather than USB-C, but that’s another story).
I am quite incentivised to get my M17 working well in my home because I have become pretty hooked on a device that has a built in screen. Even though my iPad is usually within arms reach when I am listening to music there is still something that feels more convenient to me about picking up the actual player to look what’s in the queue or do some other simple music management tasks.
Hi, Zero problems over here with my M17 over here. I’ve got multiple access-points in my house, and handovers are going 100%, without any service ineterruption using my M17 as a ROON endpoint.