Incessant stutter. Playing thru Bluesound Node - So why is this happening?

Support
1

Core Machine (Operating system/System info/Roon build number)**
NUC 10

Network Details (Including networking gear model/manufacturer and if on WiFi/Ethernet)
NUC is hardwired.
A ton of work to set that up and wish I hadn’t.

Audio Devices (Specify what device you’re using and its connection type - USB/HDMI/etc.)
Bluesound Node is on wifi.
Feeds wifi into Bluesound Node 2i which feeds into Cambridge Audio CXA61 integrated amp.

Description Of Issue
Incessant stutter. Playing thru Bluesound Node.

I do not play thru this often. 1x maybe 2x month.

I live in the mountains and power goes out often, so we reboot a ton. I do not need to be told to reboot. It happens 5 or 6 times a week whether we want it to or not.

All of a sudden, as in tonight for the first time ever, playing thru the system described above is stu stu stu stuttering. Playing thru an iPad, iPhone, Sonos Move, all good.

Just thru Bluesound Node. Yes. I rebooted

Frankly I’m getting really tired of Roon’s selective crap. It sucks that this week output A works great, but if I don’t use it for a month, I cannot rely on it working again. I NEVER KNOW if it’s going to work from one week to the next. My family is pretty sure that I’ve been fleeced by Roon scammers. Glad I didn’t buy a lifetime.

Sonos is way more reliable, even if it doesn’t have as many bells and whistles. I will gladly take reliable over fancy any day.

But I really hope I’m wrong because I love the concept of Roon, even if the current incarnation totally sucks. Because it does.

Get it folks? I have Sonos. It’s better than your product. I will gladly sell all my Roon crap of it cannot be made to work reliably.

Ok, so I’m done whining.

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The issue of poor performance of the Node 2i over WiFi with Roon is a well known and long standing issue which, as far as I am aware, is yet to be fully resolved. Most people hard wire to the network or via an access point in order to bypass the issue. I think it is recognised as a Bluesound issue because the problem goes away when you hardwire. You can blame Roon but I don’t think this is for them to fix. As a network troubleshooter I find if all things work except one device the problem is with that one device. But if you are determined to blame Roon this advice won’t change that.

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Thank you. So I guess I’m not going crazy. But I set this all up in September. All worked well thu Dec., then went bad. No rhyme or reason. Didn’t change anything at all. Now pretty ■■■■■■ that I wasted $450 on Blue ■■■■■■■■■ Researched it quite a bit and NEVER hear this.

4

I put a WiFi bridge on my Node 2. It works perfectly, doesn’t cost much and removes the reliance on the internal bluesound WiFi radio.

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Thank you Tim. But I have to say I have no idea what a wifi bridge is. And I’m really reluctant to put another dime into anything trying to get Roon to work the way Roon says it should. I have about 2k into the “magic of Roon” and I have yet to see anything but headaches.

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I’m not “determined to blame Roon.” But I’m also determined not to spend any more $ buying yet more crap to try to get Roon’s product to work the way they say it does. It’s like buying a Ford that you’re told can do xxx, but then learning that it will only do xxx if you spend another 5k on new wheels, 2k on new tires, 3k on a new fuel pump, blah blah blah. Not “blaming” Roon, but not much of a fan. I feel pretty ripped off at the moment.

Sonos was pretty upfront. I knew what I was buying and exactly what it could and could not do. Roon, not so much. Got Roon. Then got Bluesound. Then got Cambridge Audio. Then got some other crap. Now I find a need a “wifi bridge,” and have no clue what that is. Nor do I care.

When I bought Sonos they said “buy a speaker.” So I did. And it worked. Then I bought another. And it worked too. Then I bought another. Crazy, but it worked too.

So you’re going to say…”then shut up and go buy more Sonos stuff.” Don’t bother. I get it. And I will.

Wanna buy some stuff? I think I’m done with Roon.

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Not to mindlessly defend RoonLabs, but what @Henry_McLeod was telling you is that it isn’t Roon’s product that isn’t working the way they say it does, it’s Bluesound’s.

You can of course blame Roon’s certification process for not flagging the issue, and maybe you’d be right to do so, but you could also ask yourself why in a world where WiFi has been the norm for the past decade and a half, Bluesound couldn’t get such a simple thing right.

It’s a small, relatively cheap device that, in this case, would serve as a much better antenna for your bluesound device, and replace its defective WiFi implementation. Good ones go for something between 50 and 100 bucks, which is less than the hit you’d take by selling your Roon kit out of (understandable) rage. You can find them for less, but do ask for advice. FWIW, I’ve had a TPLink RE450 I’ve been happy with for the past couple of years.

What you do not want to do is set one up as a repeater: you don’t want it to “extend” your signal, you just want it to give you better WiFI reception and connect your speaker via its (working) ethernet port. Don’t hesitate to ask for help.

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I have 2 RE 450 running fine, just plug in 2 min configure and go

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You might also consider a small battery UPS backup. With repeated sudden power losses, it seems inevitable you’ll have your database corrupted. That will suck.
While I don’t live in the mountains, we get a lot of power glitches. I put our router and my NUC on a small battery UPS backup and everything stays stable through glitches and switchovers to the generator.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: UPS for my NUC8i7BEH

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This. IMHO, all electronics should be on a small UPS for both surge protection and providing the ability to turn off the equipment properly; especially computers that run a database like a Roon Core.

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A lan cable might be a cheaper option to connect the blue sound to the network too

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The NUC and router are on UPS. Node is not. Would that matter? The Node just seems to have a mind of its own even if the wifi signal is solid. I will take a gander at a wifi bridge. But what I find baffling and frustrating is that it seemed to work with none of these issues for a couple of months. Maybe there’s something “in the water.”

But I should also note that the Node is less than 2’ away from a Google Nest router/expansion device so I don’t know if adding a wifi bridge to the Node would provide any extra benefits.

And I get not wanting to take a $ hit offloading Roon related equipment, but I’m not one to buy into the “sunk cost fallacy.” If it’s not going to work, I’m the sort to take my lumps and move on rather than to continue spending money on theoretical fixes for a problem that isn’t completely understood and which defies certain diagnosis. But that’s just me.

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If I could do that I would. Have to either run it outside and around the house, or drill holes in the floor and route cable through the garage, yada, yada, yada.

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just for troubleshooting the issue or move the BS to router and maybe try it there

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One of the most basic elements of having a trouble free Roon system is having a solid wired infrastructure to connect your Roon core system and endpoints. You can always have flakey wireless situations because your neighbor is now stepping on your wireless channel, your microwave is interfering, you have devices in your house competing for bandwidth, etc, etc. But even if you have no problems with these issues and even if you have no trouble running Sonos wireless – Roon can still be problematic because the bit rate for HD music Roon is sending over the network is so much higher. To put it in perspective:

  • a CD quality file @ 44.1k/16 bit streams at 1.4 mbps. (this is the highest resolution Sonos supports)
  • a 44.1k/24 bit file streams at 2.1mbps (.5x higher than Sonos)
  • a 96k/24 bit file streams at 4.6 mbps (3.2x higher than Sonos)
  • a 192/24 bit file streams at 9.2 mbps (6.5x higher than Sonos and what your Node supports)
  • a 352.8/24 bit file streams at 16.9 mbps (17x higher than Sonos; I’ll stop here because it’s beyond what your Node supports even though Roon can still stream even higher def files)

So you can see the network demands for HD in Roon is magnitudes higher than needed for Sonos and there is NO getting around this if you want to be in the HD world. If your network can’t handle this then you will have never ending issues… You are always taking chances by wirelessly connecting endpoints, especially ones like Bluesound Nodes that have had problems with this for a long time. (BTW, I have 2 of them in my 10 zone house system that run wired with no problems).

So if you want to fix your problems, wire your endpoint(s). If you don’t want to do this, then you may be better off going back to Sonos and stay in the CD quality world. Of course there will be countless people who will chime in that they have no issue running wireless and good for them but if Roon users would ensure they’ve invested in great network gear and set up a solid network infrastructure and wired their components – an unbelievable number of Roon problems would disappear from this forum. There is a good reason that if you’re having a problem, the first question Roon support will ask you is what is your network setup…

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Thanks. I understand that. But that doesn’t leave room for an explanation as to why it worked without issue from August to December and only recently started hiccupping. Same wifi, same hardware, same, same, same. Except different and I don’t know how to identify or diagnose the difference.

If it were a simple matter of needing to hardwire thru to the end point these problems should have been happening consistently since the system was set up wouldn’t you think? And it shouldn’t just be limited to the Node. At least that’s how my brain solves problems like this. Start by correcting for the variables. If I can just find ‘em.

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There are countless issues that can affect wireless and they can come and go over time. I named a few. And yours may go away tomorrow and you may never know what caused it. Little wireless problems can cause big issues with Roon. My point is simply to fix it the right way and never have these again.

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I had some problems with a pulse flex and a node integrated in a 8 zone player/endpoint network (all other endpoints wired). Some times they disappeared; it was quite annoying. The solution was in fact a two wlan repeater with a rj45 LAN-Port (wired connection to the pulse flex and the node). After that: never ever had any problems!

If I were you I would give it a chance, try to establish a wired connection and forget about those wlan-problems.

Happy listening!

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You live in the mountains so maybe this is less concern. However, Wifi is dependent on something you cannot see, Radio Frequency (RF). RF is impacted by a lot of things and, because you cannot see it, your network performance may change and the only indication of that change is something doesn’t work that was working. The radio frequencies used in Wifi are relatively “short” (0.125 and 0.06 meters). Even moving a chair can cause differences in performance. Hardwired doesn’t have this issue as cables don’t really degrade over time. If the cable is good and its working it will, generally, stay working. Wifi? Not so much. Anyway, the biggest cause of Wifi performance going south in urban areas is your neighbors doing something so being far aways from others helps. But it does not eliminate changes in environment which impact RF. Consumer grade router don’t really provide the tools to troubleshoot this. I’ve got some “enterprise” level stuff (Ubiquity) and I’m averaging a complete channel move across my APs once a quarter to keeps things happy. Some radios deal with changing conditions better than others. The Bluesound is just known to not have very good wifi.

You can try and make it better by lining up your router and Bluesound to be “line of sight” with each other. That is, can they actually “see” each other? Height is important too. Stick your router up on a shelf instead of on the ground. Eliminate as much as possible between the Bluesound and the router. This will help. Or, and the better option, find a solution that doesn’t rely on the Bluesound wifi. That can be power line, wlan / wifi repeater or bridge, etc.

Good luck.

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