NAD CI580v2 (and generally Bluesound?) - Remove Roon Certification?

So… Historically I had great trouble trying to get some Bluesound-devices to work well in a larger setup. Had Bluesound Nodes, Powernodes, Bluesound Flex. Basically the entire lineup, creating a ~10 zone system. Problems was music stopping, desync, slow startup and other issues… At this time I was trying to partly use Wifi, and I struggled a ton, and finally moved to ethernet. I also switched the entire network system twice (from Asus Router, to a Mesh solution, to Unifi) …But it never worked out really well…

Bluesound support just blamed my network or Roon. Roon never could give any clear response as to what was the problem. In the end I sold all Bluesound devices and ended up using some Raspberry Pi’s and Devialet Phantoms instead (which worked great! I never looked back).

Since then I bought a house and setup a new big system, all wired through ethernet… Since I will run a very serious setup in the house (12+ zones) I was looking for a good alternative for a streamer that could supply many zones and I ended up going for the NAD CI580v2… I figured since some years had passed, and they were Roon Ready, firmware fixes should have gotten these up to speed. I shouldn’t have have gotten them…

I first bought one, and tried it in my apartment setup and it seemed to work okay.
What I didn’t try out though was playing more than one zone at the same time combined with various other players… Now I got 3 of these CI580v2’s to run my current 12 zones in the house, and honestly it doesn’t work at all if I enable them as Roony Ready… It’s terribly unstable :frowning:

All devices are on Ethernet.
I run ROCK on an i5 NUC which should be plenty powerful enough.
I mainly stream from Tidal or Internet Radio (not a local library)
The Roon-endpoints are 3x NAD CI580v2
The network is a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (cat6a) running on a Unifi system
(UDM Pro with 48port Unifi gigabit switches connected with fibre)

Problems
Music gets out of sync
Music stops
Internet radio doesn’t work at all basically if I play to many zones at once

I have now resolved to enabling them using Airplay instead to Roon, and then it works well to play.

I think Roon should revoke the Roon Ready certification for these NAD CI580v2s.
Most likely it’s the same with other NAD or Bluesound devices still. I see plenty of similar threads in the forum…

I am sure if you setup a bigger setup of 5+ individual zones and start playing with groups etc, you will see the same issues as I do. It works different depending on what you stream. Internet radio is a big no-no… it just stops basically instantly… Tidal MQA streaming can work “okay” but it sometimes gets out of sync, or drops out. It’s not stable enough for me to consider it completely.

I just wanted to vent a bit after investing quite a lot into some expensive devices that just doesn’t work as advertised :rage:

With this I also came up with an idea. Since the certification sadly doens’t seem to be a reliable stamp, How about if Roon could allow users to rate Roon hardware on the Roon website? Also combined with information about the overall setup (number of zones, wifi or etherhet) This could form a nice database to search in for those looking for what to buy!

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