Multichannel breaks Roon Bridge on DietPi x86

I am using DietPi x86_64 v9.9.0 on an Intel NUC11TNK to make a Roon Bridge with a Roon display. Connection is HDMI to a Marantz Cinema 50 receiver. It works with 2 channel audio, however, when I enable 7.1 or 5.1 audio, Roon says its playing but the Marantz claims no audio. Rebooting the NUC will allow 2 channel to play again.

I have had multichannel audio working with the same equipment with the Roon ROCK image, but that doesn’t give me a display.

Software installed is (5) ALSA, (6) X Server, (103) RAMlog, (104) Dropbear, (113) Chromium, (121) Roon Bridge and (200) Dashboard.

Do you have the intel audio driver installed?

I believe so:

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After a reboot, aplay does show the Marantz again:

Can you try to select the “intel-sst-dsp” option? It will install some additional firmware packages firmware-intel-sound and firmware-sof-signed. It will set hw:0,0 as default audio device, which does not seem to exist. However, Roon does not use ALSA PCMs anyway but use the hardware directly, so it should not matter. Else you can also select another device afterwards, the firmware won’t be uninstalled, or you just install the packages directly:

apt install firmware-intel-sound firmware-sof-signed

Else, I am not expert either, but is there a chance that due to HDMI hardware limitations, it is either display output + 2 channels, or more channels but no display output?

Hi David.

I just use these settings:

with my NUC13ANHi7 and HDMI 0 (audio settings Roon) and surround works fine.

Good luck

Torben

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Hi @MichaIng is it installing this firmware, even if everything is working fine?

I’ve installed the sound drivers @MichaIng suggested and checked the Sound card setting @Torben_Rick suggested, but it may be tomorrow before I have a chance to test.


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Yes, the intel-sst-dsp option is explicitly meant to install related Intel firmware. If not needed, one of the detected hardware PCMs “hw:n,m” can be selected instead.

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Tested with the new drivers and settings, no change. works fine set to 2.0, even with high bitrates.


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Plays DSD to PCM fine.
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But, setting it to 5.1 breaks playback, even switching back to 2.0, until the NUC is rebooted.
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Roon shows that it is still playing and the display still works.

As a sanity check I’m going to reload Roon ROCK on the NUC and confirm that it will playback multichannel, but I have had it working that way before, just won’t give me a Roon display.

Have you set channel mapping in Roon correctly? what are the device settings in Roon for the Marantz. It may not supports 32bit via HDMI for Multichanel so try and reduce to 24bits. It does feel like bad EDID info though so its only reporting back 2.0 channel support. But it shows nothing at all on the inputs for multichannel odd.

I don’t understand your signal path. As far I know there is only a PCM (96 kHz / 24 bit) Surroundmix version of Fleetwood Mac Rumours. But that is not what your are showing

Torben

https://www.discogs.com/release/3469652-Fleetwood-Mac-フリートウッドマック-Rumours-噂

AJ

That could be the issue! According to the Marantz specs it only supports up to 24 bit, but I did have it working with 2 channel at 32 bits. I’ll try multichannel at 24 bits tonight.

Disappointingly, after changing to 24bit, either 5.1 or 7.1 breaks the NUC playback. Changing back to 2.0 doesn’t work by itself, I have to restart the NUC.

Just to say I tried everything, I also tried 16 bit 5.1 but still failed.

Odd we have other users using it without issues such as @Michael_Harris but not to a Marantz AV. Have you tried another cable to see if it’s a handshake issue?

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I have been happily using it multi channel on DietPi for about 11 months without issue.

Having recently had a number of kernel and other Updates I will try it again tonight after we finish watching TV , as I have some new multi channel music I want to listen to anyway :grin:

(My HDMI Device is Sonos and it is limited to 24/48)

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Ok it didn’t take long to confirm all was working perfectly well still for me.
Still sounds great as well

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@Michael_Harris what hardware are you running DietPi on? I’m going to try a Raspberry Pi 4, I know it will be limited to 16 bit.