I have four Bluesound Pulse Flex 2i speakers spread across three rooms in my (relatively small) apartment. (Two of them are grouped as a stereo pair.) I have used Roon in the past to play music through my Cambridge CXN and the four Bluesound speakers, and they used to be perfectly synchronized. Over the past several months to a year (I'm not sure of the exact timing), the synchronization has become spottier and spottier, to the point where it now does not work at all, making the entire system unusable for multiroom playback.
I have read up on this in various support forums and understand it is a known issue going back to May 2023. I also understand that the typical response is that it could be a network problem, cable problem, etc. Whether or not those are the causes, it seems to me that after all this time and all the complaints there should be more information forthcoming about this issue, including whether a reliable fix is in the pipeline. Could you please let me know the status of your work on this? I would like to start making plans for my system, including a decision whether to get rid of the Bluesound speakers, which, although I bought them based on a recommendation on the Roon website, do not appear compatible with Roon at all anymore.
One note: I changed my network provider at some point in early 2023, when my apartment building started providing internet service and I canceled my Comcast account. I do not believe the new network is the cause of the problem since I am fairly certain the speakers were synchronized when I first made the change; however, I expect you will want me to check certain router settings, etc., and I am limited in my ability to do that on my own, because I do not have full administrator-type privileges to adjust settings on the router.
Please let me know if there are any diagnostics or steps I can take to try to resolve this issue. I have tried most of the suggestions I saw in the forums, and none have worked.
Thanks in advance.
Describe your network setup
I have a building-issued Ruckus router. It’s mounted on my ceiling, and I don’t know the model. I have a Nucleus and a Cambridge CXN streamer that both are wired to the router. My Bluesound speakers connect via WiFi.
The BluOS team has been working with us directly behind the scenes to pinpoint wider reports of multi-room sync reports. You can expect an eventual fix or workaround in a future release from either BluOS or RoonServer, and we’ll post updates in this thread: NAD/Bluesound Grouped Zones out of sync [Investigating]
Looking at diagnostics associated with your account, we can see the clock drift varying widely during grouped playback with the Zones you’ve described. There are also network dropouts and packet loss reported between Zones and controllers in this environment that RoonServer has logged - in most cases, the network recovered, but we can perform some due diligence that might help resolve these symptoms in the meantime while you await broader action.
What is the network topology serving this grouped Zone? Are they all connected to the same piece of hardware (router, access point, etc) or spread across nodes? Do these endpoints all use WiFi, ethernet, or a mix?
If you have a mesh network, confirm that multicast forwarding is enabled, along with IGMP snooping.
Thanks for the response. I’ll answer your questions, report a related issue, and provide an update.
All of the devices are connected to the same router. The Nucleus, Cambridge CXN, and the Synology NAS containing my music files are all wired to it. The Bluesound speakers all connect by WiFi. There is no mesh network.
Note that the Bluesound speakers are pretty reliable when I use BluOS to play them. They are alway in sync and usually do not cut out or otherwise have any problems, which suggests to me that the WiFi connection or distance from the router probably are not issues.
I want to add one separate issue that I didn’t mention before, which is that Roon consistently stops playback when I’m playing files from the NAS to the Bluesound speakers. This happens every time, usually after one or two tracks. I will get “an audio file is loading slowly” or some other error message. This does not happen when I play only through the CXN and clearly is linked somehow to the involvement of the Bluesound speakers.
The update is that I have just tried a new workaround, which is to set both “Resync Delay” and “Zone grouping delay” to 500 ms. This seems to have resolved (at least for now) the sync issue. If it continues to work, I’m fine with leaving those settings in place permanently, but I’ll have to see.
Please let me know any further thoughts. Thanks again.
Thanks for the update and additional information! Resync Delay is a handy tool - I hope it proves useful for you moving forward!
If possible, could you reproduce this issue specifically and share the track name when you run into the playback failure? From there, we’ll enable Roon Server diagnostics and take a closer look. It may also be helpful to snap a screenshot of your signal path when this happens.
I haven’t been able to reproduce the track-stopping issue since adjusting the sync settings as described above, so it’s possible those settings may have resolved that issue.
But, the sync issue has come back. The speakers are in sync some of the time, but often they are not. I first noticed this when I paused a track—when I unpaused, the speakers were no longer in sync. There also have been a bunch of occasions where the music just starts out of sync and never corrects. This is with the resync and grouping delay settings both at 500 ms.
Hi @brownadamd,
Thanks for the additional data point. We have all of the details we need at this point. Keep an eye on the thread @benjamin linked you to. When there are updates you’ll see them there.
