Good news. Sluggishness is gone with Sonos endpoints. So no immediate need to change. If I decide to go another direction than Sonos in the main living room, I will have to go down the RAAT endpoint endpoint replacement. I believe what fixed it for me was getting the one wireless speaker on the sonos mesh network. Will still make sure the wired and wireless network are all where they need to be as well which will help no matter what endpoints are used. Thanks for a ll the comments and suggestions. The M10 is still tempting me, however.
Darin
Thatās great news, now you can both save and spend money and keep everyone (meaning no one happy).
I like the look of both the M10 and the Naim Unity Atom, but I am always drawn to the amazing volume control on the Atom. Forgetting everything else, I would have to choose that.
Mike
The big draw of the M10 (besides being Roon ready) is Dirac room correction, super compact, amplification based on hypex nc252 modules, nifty display showing now playing, subwoofer integration. I better stop or Iāll be ordering one
Darrin I hear you.
Send me a message when you have ordered it
And good luck with the Sonos and I hope it stays reliable for you
Mike
Purchased an NAD M10 to compare it with the Sonos Amp. Keeping the M10 in the living room. It is solid, sounds great, plenty of power, and just works. Room correction (Dirac) works great as well. Built in screen looks nice to display Roon now playing. Will be replacing the Sonos endpoints on the ones I want to group with it.
Darin
I have built a number of Piās for headphone listening stations and feeding into Sonos systems via Coxial and phono leads (or USB), these have worked really well and were easy to build and get running (as in put it in case and write out the software you want HiFiBerry OS or Ropieee) and attach power and off you go. But that is dependent on your Sonos gear having inputs for this.
But if you had one in the Amp somewhere you can then group that with others through the phono leeds and it would play to all rooms at once
In my testing I was surprised how well it worked
Mike
I have an allo boss I am going to try to hook up to the sonos play 5 speaker in the master bedroom. It sounds good, so would rather not change itā¦ will give that a go.
Definitely worth a go, just needs to sync with everything else.
Well now I have and am keeping the NAD M10, I am looking to get the master bedroom set up. I have 2 Revel M106 speakers. I need a small endpoint with wifi here (this will be the only wifi endpoint). Also need a small amp to drive them. I could go with an NAD Powernode 2i but $899 seems a bit high. Thoughts?
Darin have a good read through the forums about the Powernode 2i as there are a lot of complaining there.
Problems seem to be mostly in the area of WiFi issues. Otherwise it looks like a good solution.
Mike
Iām using Bluesound Node 2 (WiFi), Pulse Soundbar (Ethernet) and Pulse Soundbar 2i (WiFi). They all work flawlessly with Roon, Bluesound app and Tidal Connect.
Another advantage of the Bluseound over Sonos is that the former allows different eq settings for TV and Music. The Soundbar 2i offers that and I find it is very helpful. I think (but worth double checking) that the Powernode 2i offers the same. I briefly owned the Sonos playbase and I recall that I could not use separate EQ for TV which meant that I could not find a comfortable setting for both. What worked for TV (bass / treble / loudness etc) definitely did not sound good for music. I briefly heard the Sonos Amp a year ago but I did not check for EQ settings between TV and Music.
FWIW, the simplest combination Iāve found for non-critical listening (basically replacing my Sonos 3 endpoints) where I already have a pair of decent passive speakersā¦ is an RPi with DAC hat, and a nobsound/douk audio eBay D-class tiny amplifier for $30. Ends up being just north of $100. Your Revelās are NOT that - Iām using these set-ups for my old Paradigm Atoms I had lying aroundā¦ but thought I should mention it because itās been a useful way to get out of āSonos everythingā.
Thanks for your reply. Has wireless bee solid for you?
So Ropieee on Rpi4 wireless has been a mixed bag. I think in part that WiFi (even my fairly bombproof Ubiquiti Unifi) is less tuned to the needs of music than the mesh SonosNet. Itās also that Sonos caps the bandwidth, and if youāre playing a 24/192 MQA file, itās just a LOT more data than Sonos will allow you to carry. Of course, you can cap that by setting the zone to 24/48 as the max, and your core will downsample which keeps the network from having to deal with all that bandwidth.
Anyways, to more simply answer your question, my bedside rig (RPi ā SMSL M500) has been flawless on WiFi even at high sample rates (this is a DSD/MQA dac, and itās through three plaster walls to the nearest WiFi AP. My attempt to move away from Sonos in the living room to a similar rig didnāt work at all - lots of dropouts. Went back to a Sonos:Amp. So YMMV, no guarantees - but itās been nice to have an option to revive some of my old passive speakers that are lying around inexpensively.
I had similar issues, but thankfully I have a mixed environment now that seems to behaving itself even when upscaled to 24/192.
At times it would just drop off a cliff, but the Orbiās running into ethernet deviceās seems to have done the trick with some settings tweaked and I have been very happy and now have 3 RAAT based headphone rigs as well as the Sonos devices for when we want music everywhere.
When it eventually comes time to replace the Sonos devices I think I will be looking for all RAAT devices and probably towards active speakers, do hopefully we see more progress with these in the next year or two.
Mike
Thanks for the replies. Music max is cd quality either via ripped cdās, or via Tidal. Due to our poor internet speed, often times we run Tidal on āhighā setting which is 320k AAC. So doesnāt need a ton of bandwidth.
Decided to go with Node 2/2i instead of a more DIY route for now. Will see how it goes.