Hello all.
Been using roon for a year or two now and enjoy it a great deal. Hoping to get some help from the community. I basically have 4 zones with the following hardware.
Main audio room: Minidsp SHD( RAAT)
Living Room: Sonos Amp
Master Bedroom: Sonos Play 5
Garage/Deck:Sonos Connect>2 zone amp (both deck/garage play same content
I have enjoyed Sonos very much, in particular the network stability even with Roon. But lately it has been sluggish and not as solid, so I am looking to move to an all RAAT endpoint house.
Current plan:
Main audio room: no change
Living room: NAD M10
Bedroom: ?
Deck/Garage: ?
Thoughts?
I also had Sonos gear from years ago and they still work fine, so it’s odd you’re noticing sluggishness.
Regardless…
IMO, best options are:
- Chromecast Audio
- Ropieee on Raspberry Pi
Both of the above will provide audio output so your Living Room and Garage/Deck can be easily replaced.
For your Play 5 and the “amp” portion of your living room, it depends on your budget and level of quality audio you’re looking for. You can get a $50 amp or much more expensive gear like the NAD M10.
Hi Darin I have a similar setup to you, with Sonos Amp in main living room and then mutiple sets of paired Play 1’s and Play 3’s as well as a few on their own. Been a Roon user two years and besides issues early in the setup (Network mainly) I have been very happy with things.
I assume you have moved over to S2 now given the use of the Amp, but I have never had any sluggishness with Roon and Sonos (in fact it works too well for us to change).
But given that I have had an interest in Pi’s running as RAAT endpoints and I have built several Pi’s for driving headphone DAC/AMP’s and also for feeding high resolution into the Sonos (but family want main Sonos left alone).
I also have some Chromecast audio feeding a separate amp and Dac but that is not RAAT so does not give you what you want.
Are you going to be streaming to all devices at once? if not I would look at different options available and decide on Amplifiers to drive from Pi’s using digital volume controls. There are a lot of choices and how you want to run it will drive your decision as it could get pretty expensive.
Mike
If you’re moving to a more “Roon centric” architecture you’ll want to deploy RAAT endpoints in as many places as possible. While the M10 is a good bit of kit do a search for it on these forums and you might not be as excited about it.
You didn’t mention if you were trying to remove all the Sonos gear from your system(s) or if you were just trying to stop Roon from sending audio using the Sonos protocol.
I thought the NAD M10 had recently been certified Roon Ready, in which case wouldn’t the past problems be just that, in the past? Please note that I’m not trying to start an argument and, instead, am merely seeking clarification.
Living room/master bedroom and deck/garage-yes. The main audio room isn’t necessary
I may need to check out my network in more detail, reboot everything. When controlling all of the sonos components via roon it has been acting up. Pressing play, there is quite a long delay before it starts playing. Sometimes when I press play on the first song it will stop playing. Thought maybe it was becasue it was sonos. All are on wired connection, except the sonos play 5 which is on wireless.
I thought the NAD M10 was now Roon certified. Is that not the case, or is not not working well with Roon? I was asking some people on audiosciencereview and they were saying it is working great. Would definitely like more input from anyone that currently has one and there expereince.
Appreciate all of the thoughts
Hi Darin people have often complained about Blue OS devices specifically over WiFi, though these are usually the BlueSound streamers I keep reading about, not a NAD M10, so maybe @ipeverywhere can expand on that.
If you are having some slow downs on Sonos at 16/44 I would guess you will certainly have worse if you are upscaling to 24/192 or anything else.
What is the status of your network, wired or wireless?
Mike
I have a mix of Sonos, Airplay, and RAAT endpoints and detect no difference in terms of speed or stability. If you’re not wanting to get rid of your Sonos gear for other reasons, you may be looking in the wrong place to solve your issue. It sounds to me as if there’s something going on with your network.
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I’ll second that. My environment is 10 Sonos zones, 3 Ropieee (RAAT)/Pi2AES and a couple iOS mobile endpoints. I have had real issues, but all thusfar have been resolved by network tuning / config and putting music local to ROCK. Love my Sonos - for what it is built for - and it coexists just fine.
Couple of things:
1-Will first see about check out out my wired/wireless network.
2-In the living room the sonos amp is a nice device. I have had one issue with it, where on dolby digital the sound affects are way louder than everything else. I changed a setting it our apple tv where it reduces dynamic range and I think that is ok now. But if not I will need to replace it. That is where the M10 idea came in. And if I change that, then I can’t group the other 2 sonos zones with it.
Darin I think your WiFi has to be the starting point, as Roon is harsh on networks, hence me asking about whether you plan on upscaling music as that would probably cause you issues.
You can try moving from SonosNet to WiFi if you home coverage is good and fast.
Mike
We have slow internet 3mb DSL, so I have Tidal streaming set to hi which is just 320k aac, so bandwidth shouldn’t be an issue at all. Also I don’t do any upscaling. I have 1 old 10/100 switch that I don’t have much confidence it and hardwired network needs cleaned up. Will do that first. Fairly new EERO router that seems to work well but will check it out as well.
I just removed the wireless play 5 from the group of living room/deck&garage and it is now responsive. I click on play/pause and it is very quick. Looks like wifi is the issue. I will see if I can make any wireless changes on the play 5, or relocate to a hard wired connection.
Darin good to see that you are starting to see where your issues exist, sorting out the networking issues will probably give your Sonos a new lease of life and then you can probably take that money and buy something really nice for your critical listening.
For most places in my house I find the Sonos more than good enough (and the Sonos Amp with my Dali floor standers and sub sound fantastic) , and where they are not it’s normally somewhere I want headphone and I have built some nice options to fit my needs there.
But the music has to be reliable, and for that I invested in Orbi mesh network when they first come out and it has been a game changer (I remember the constant dropouts of two years ago and I do not remember it fondly).
Mike
Yes, sorry I should have said that - SonosNet has been rock solid; when I had Roon and Sonos via WiFi it was an absolute nightmare. Had to reconstruct my Sonos network, by setting up RSTP correctly and reverting to a handful of wired connections, and then everything was absolutely hunky dory. I had blocked that out 
Chromecast Audios work extremely well over optical, especially if you get an OTG ethernet adapter for them. I have a couple of those in my house, and recently took the plunge to a Raspberry Pi 4 + DietPi over asynchronous USB to my NAD D 3045. It works great great great (I would love an M10 but my NAD is good enough for now).
If you want to play simultaneously in many locations then you will need to choose the same devices, so Chromecasts or Pi’s. Roon can’t mix and match the two for simultaneous play.
Sound and integration wise I think the Raspberry Pi just wins, but the Chromecasts are honestly about 98% as good, and way more versatile than a Sonos setup whether you rely on WiFi or not.
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Progress is good to have Main music listening space is pretty well set for me. Minidsp SHD with JBL 250 ti speakers / JBL b460 sub and with NC400 based NAD M27 amp and a McIntosh MC252 briedged running the sub. SHD provides crossover and Dirac. I don’t ever link up this zone to the other 3 as it is downstairs so it not being sonos like the other 3 is fine. Sounds like the network issue will follow me if I am running sonos or other roon endpoints, so best to get this figured out either way.
Darin sounds like a nice setup and yes you are correct.
So many people stay in denial and refuse to fix Network issues, but it is the bit that makes all the difference.
I missed the post about the 3Mb DSL and old 100Mb switches so the switches probably a good place to start. I am assuming basic unmanaged switches and they are very cheap so makes sense
Mike
How do you make sure that sonos is using sonosnet?
So they can’t have your WiFi credentials (SonosNet is totally separate, different protocol). That’s the way it is by default when you set up Sonos. A lot of people set up WiFi credentials because they either don’t want to have any wired connections or they think it will work better. I think the actual use cases are probably pretty slim.
This is the gist of removing:
However, if you have a spread out network, you can end up with a segmented Sonos base and start to have to reset zones and re-add them. So no guarantees this is pain free… if you end up in that doom cycle there are a number of threads about it on Sonos support, and the key diagnosis here is whether you end up seeing both WM:0 and WM:1 on different zones in system/about. Not trying to tell you stuff will get bad, but I’ve gone down this road twice and ended up in a bad state both times - but happened because I have a large and complex WiFi set-up.
PM me if you have any questions.