Perhaps “packet loss” was misused. I’m using a PING monitor, (EMCO), to assess the network and pings that don’t get responded to within the window of time are considered “lost” - this is caused by network congestion/contention. I noticed that when the PING “loss” was above a certain threshold ROON would start skipping. Reorganising my network (multiple switches) reduced the congestion and stopped the skipping.
Are you editing movies?
I would love to here more about how you rewired your switches in your network. I am trying to add a second eight port switch to my network resulting in dropouts. Tried several things with no luck.
Ken
You definitely need a seperate 5ghz WiFi network for Roon. 2.4ghz doesn’t have enough bandwidth for streaming and sending it to an endpoint at the same time in HiRes.
My experience confirms that you first need to fix the network. I had all kinds of signal loss, dropouts, not only with Roon, but also browsing web on mobile etc. Finally I came to conclusion that I have to spend some money on network infrastructure. Completely wired (optical) network to every room would be ideal, but too much hassle for me. So I bought combination of Ubiquiti mesh wifi boxes and Devolo powerline adapters for each room. It works great. Forgot cheap-ass switches and routers from Dlink, TP-LInk, Asus etc. For a peace of mind there are “premium” brands.
First caveat: I’m not a network expert, so I’m making this up as I go along… but I will explain what worked for me.
My network was:
Router -> 24 port switch (office) -> one long cable to 8 port switch (lounge) -> one long cable to 8 port switch (hi-fi) -> one long cable to 12 port switch (home cinema)
All ports in use. This was causing issues on ROON endpoint (hi-fi). All devices after the (lounge) were showing high contentions. No packets lost, of course, but enough delays to trip ROON.
I resolved it by adding a second switch to the lounge, the first handled the incoming line from the office and fed directly to the hifi and one line to the second switch (3 connections instead of 8).
OLD:
Office —> Lounge 1
2
3
4
…
8 ---- Hi Fi
NEW:
Office ----> 1
2 — Hi Fi
3 — Lounge
Lounge —> 1…8
My “logic” was that by adding the 2nd switch with minimum connections in the (lounge) location I was reducing the length of the “path” to the hifi switch. It works, but I suspect more by luck than design!!
Sometimes 
My network is heavily populated (70+ devices) - lots of security cameras, audio streamers, multiple NAS boxes, multiple PCs working most of the day, TV streaming etc etc etc…
That explains a lot!
While it might, I do find it disappointing that ROON is so sensitive to the network in this way. I can stream 4K movies with zero issues for instance, which in terms of bandwidth is WAY beyond what ROON needs for music.
I run Roon on a virtualized Ubuntu 18.04 machine. It did happen more then once, when I did SSH into the Roon server, that the audio stream stopped. With build 521 it is no problem.
Currently it is very stable. I can do a live migration of the virtual machine to another physical machine and there is no interrupt on the music stream.
I would also like more about the buffering of Roon. When I do debugging it looks like it reads the whole music file into RAM at system start.
I have as many devices if not more in my network.
I use VLAN separation to keep data and traffic away from each other. In top of this I do QoS at the router level (L3 Switch). I have a total of 3 switches. Two L2 and my core at L3 than my firewall.
No issues with roon bandwidth, no latency, no packet loss.
OH and I do wifi both 2.4 and 5GHz for some of my endpoints including sonos.
Only issues I have run in to is that once in a blue moon, roon stop streaming due to resources been scarce on my server and this is self inflicted.
By the way, there is an amount of latency that is considered normal or acceptable over wifi. But ethernet should never experience packet drops nor latency on a local network.
The house we moved to last summer has coax throughout, but it’s pretty much impossible without major work to run cat-6 through the walls (lots of concrete, tight conduits, …). Instead, I went for a combination of Actiontec MoCA adapters and Ubiquiti AmpliFi mesh WiFi. WAN is provided by Comcast cable with fallback to Sonic/AT&T DSL (long story) with an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter PoE-5 that sits next to the home coax box. All of the coax with MoCA adapters is bridged together, and one adapter connects the EdgeRouter to that. MoCA adapters in other rooms connect to dumb NetGear switches for local distribution. Rock solid, but then I don’t use the house internal coax for anything else, as we don’t care for cable TV.
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That was true maybe two decades ago but nowadays it’s not.
Even dsd512 is only 50Mbps, you could do that in theory with 802.11b/g.
Not upsampling is only good if you have a nos dac, otherwise it’s better to have an extrernal computer upsample your music than to let your dac upsample. Most times
How about with rock as os? You tried that if I’m right?
It depends on the DACs upsampling filter. The Yggdrasil in discussion here has a unique filter especially designed to get the most of Redbook (44.1) PCM. From personal experience, it works very well.
and that’s exactly why I ended with “most times”. I’m sure iggy does it right.
I guess it should be alright, but WiFi acts strange with a lot of local interference, resending packages, so another theoretical problem could be a small buffer in the Lumin.
Grant,
I had a similar problem with my mac mini (irregular dropouts in the playback). A friend suggested it might be caused by other software on the machine causing interrupts in the flow of data. My solution was to do a clean install with only the software required to do the job.
Has worked flawlessly ever since.
Give it a try.
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Not a bad idea
I have ordered an Innuos Zenith Mk III