Meridian endpoints keep disappearing (ref#0XC73X)

Support
1

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· None of the above quite fits

None of the above quite fits

· None of these quite match

Tell us what's going on

· Meridian endpoints continuously disappearing

Tell us about your home network

· Unifi network, no vpn, Roon and Meridian devices all on their own vlan.

2

This has been happening for several weeks now. All other non-Meridian endpoints are fine, just the MS200 and the 218 disappear.

Whilst playing they will go offline, and I get the ‘Select an Audio Zone’ blurb. This happens continuously, I can’t even get through one song. It happens with both locally stored music (second drive inside the ROCK NUC, and Tidal streamed music.

3

Hi @Jason_McHattan

We have requested the diagnostic data from your account. I’ve been through them in detail and have a clear picture of what’s happening.

What’s going wrong

Every time a Meridian endpoint disappears, the logs show the same sequence: Roon sends a TCP keepalive ping to your device’s streaming port and gets no response back within 5 seconds, which causes Roon to tear down the connection and drop the zone. This is confirmed happening mid-song on both the Lounge 218 and the Workshop MS200.

The MS200 is also showing something extra: it’s rapidly cycling through new connection ports (incrementing into the 65,000 range over short intervals), which suggests the device is restarting its network listener repeatedly on its own.

There’s also something important in the logs: no Meridian device has connected to Roon at all since June 27, even though Meridian streaming is enabled on your Core. So currently none of the three devices are even reaching Roon.

Your Core also needs a restart. It’s been running for 21 days and memory usage has doubled over that time (1.8 GB to 3.75 GB), with garbage collection load climbing from 1.4% to 5.1% of runtime. This won’t directly cause the Meridian drops but it needs addressing regardless. This is something that our R&D is continuously improving and should be fixed on the next release.

Steps to try, in order

  1. Restart your Roon Core first. This is the single most important step right now and will reset a lot of accumulated state.
  2. After restart, go to Settings > Audio and see whether the 218 and MS200 appear within a couple of minutes. If they don’t show up at all, the issue is on the network side rather than inside Roon.
  3. If the devices are still not discovered, check your Unifi VLAN config. Specifically: make sure IGMP Snooping is enabled on the VLAN switch profile, and check that no multicast filtering is blocking traffic between the ROCK and the Meridian devices. Meridian relies on multicast for discovery and needs stable long-lived TCP connections, so anything that briefly interrupts the VLAN path will cause exactly what you’re seeing.
  4. Give the MS200 a static DHCP reservation in Unifi if it doesn’t already have one. The port cycling behaviour suggests it may be restarting and grabbing a new address or listener configuration each time.

Roon and Meridian are both very sensitive to anything that interrupts multicast discovery or breaks long-lived TCP connections, and VLANs introduce exactly that kind of complexity. We strongly recommend running a simple flat network with all Roon and audio devices on the same subnet, no VLANs involved. This removes an entire category of potential issues and is our standard best practice:

5

Hi Vadim,

Thanks very much for the advice.

I have restarted the Roon Core, and have also turned on IGMP Snooping on the network, and given the 218 a fixed IP. The ROCK was already fixed IP.

The 218 has now been running for about two hours with no problems yet. I will see how it goes.

I will give the MS200 a fixed IP as well, and give that a try.

Regards,

Jason.

6

Hi Vadim,

The 218 dropped off Roon again after about 5 hours. It was still on the network, and I could log into the 218’s webserver.

I thought maybe the MS200 was causing the problem, so I removed it from the network and tried again. Unfortunately after several hours the 218 again disappeared from Roon but was still happy and alive on the network.

Regards,

Jason.

7

Hello @Jason_McHattan \

Thanks for the update, and sorry this is still causing trouble. I pulled a fresh diagnostic bundle covering the exact window you described, and it actually shows two different failure patterns, which is useful.

Workshop MS200, at 08:39 local time, the logs show a keepalive ping to the MS200’s management port timing out after 5 seconds. That’s the same signature we saw before the network changes.

Lounge 218, this one is different. There’s no ping timeout at all. What happened is that the 218’s management connection went quiet about 5 minutes before Roon reported the drop, while the audio was still streaming perfectly the whole time on a separate connection. Roon only noticed the dead connection when the track ended and it tried to reload the zone. So the disconnect wasn’t caused by something breaking mid song, the underlying connection had already died silently, and playback just happened to keep going until the track boundary exposed it.

The part that points away from the network now is this: after each drop, Roon sent out a fresh discovery broadcast looking for both devices, and neither one answered, even though you could still reach each device’s own web page. If this were a VLAN or multicast filtering issue, discovery would have failed from the start, not worked fine at boot and then gone silent later while the web interface stayed up. That combination looks like the streaming service on each unit is hanging or crashing while the rest of the device keeps running.

Given IGMP snooping and the static IPs didn’t change this behavior, I’d like to rule out the devices themselves next:

  1. Check whether the 218 and MS200 are on the latest available firmware.
  2. Try a full power cycle of the 218 itself (pull the power, not just a Roon reconnect or Core restart), and see if it survives longer afterward.
  3. If you’re able, as a one time test, connect the 218 directly to the same switch and subnet as the ROCK, bypassing the VLAN entirely. If it still drops after a few hours in that setup, that confirms the network isn’t involved at all.

If none of that helps, this is looking like it sits on the device side rather than something Roon or your network can fix, so at that point I’d recommend reaching out to Meridian support directly and raising it with them.