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…