NAD M10 repeatedly drops out

[Wolfgang_Halter]

Roon Core Machine

Intel NUC8i5BEH
i5-8259U CPU
8GiB RAM
running Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS and the ROON Core for Linux via EasyInstaller

Networking Gear & Setup Details

AVM FritzBox 7530 Router serving as one and only Network hub
BlueSound Flex connected via WiFi in 5ghz band
HifiBerry connected via WiFi in 5ghz band
NAD M10 connected via Ethernet (same problem persists when M10 is on WiFi instead)
RoonCore connected via Ethernet

Connected Audio Devices

Streaming music from local library and Qobuz exclusively through RAAT to RoonReady devices:
BlueSound Flex2i
HifiBerry on Raspberry 4b
NAD M10

Number of Tracks in Library

10000 tracks

Description of Issue

I’m listening in a grouped setup with all three devices in one group and experience wuite frequent hickups of two kinds:

1. playback stops completely on all devices, happens completely random and rather rare, unfortunately, I don’t have a concrete example at hand for this.

2. playback stops ONLY on NAD M10 between two tracks. The other devices continue in the playlist yet the M10 just pauses. Some times, it resumes with the next track.This mainly seems to happen during Roon Radio mode and not so often when listening to one album.
   Today, this issue could be reproduced several times whithin one playlist, switching from
   “Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)” by “Phosphorescent” to
   “Sun It Rises” by “Fleet Foxes”
   at e.g. 4:57 pm CET

So far, I tried disabling all MQA capabilities of the devices, played around with the resync delay time. I also moved the M10 from WiFi to Ethernet, with no effect. Lastly, I swapped the Ethernet cable of the Roon Core but again without effect.

I am wondering if this is a hardware issue on the M10 side and if I should ask for replacement there or if this is something due to some mis-configuration.

Hope you guys can help me figure this out!
Cheers,
Wolfgang

[Wolfgang_Halter]

A quick update, in case anybody is reading this after all.
It seems to be a song specific issue. Even when just trying to play
“Sun It Rises” by “Fleet Foxes”
the M10 stays mute.
Same happens with the track
“Desperate Guys” from “The Fratellis”
in both cases, I’m streaming from Qobuz and the source files are FLAC 88.2khz 24 bit.
Interestingly, the fleet foxes song is also available at 44khz and 16 bit and that one plays without any problems. However, other songs at higher bitrates do play also without problem. Also, I kind of chose this setup of Roon and M10 for particularly high-res music so if this doesn’t work, it’s kind of a deal breaker…
Cheers

[wklie (Peter Lie)]

NAD M10 stopped working with Roon since update to BluOS 3.8.3

I have an update. I discovered that the problem is only effecting 88.2 kHz content. That ended up being most of my library because I had Roon set to upsample all 44.1 kHz content to 88.2 kHz. I can work around this by not having any content upsampled to 88.2 kHz and having any 88.2 kHz native content upsampled to 96 kHz, but if you any explanation for why this is happening I would appreciate it.

[Burkhardt_Petermann]

And it seems to be a problem with the dirac implementation.
So, the first thing can be to disable dirac on the NAD an try it again.

[Wolfgang_Halter]

Thanks a lot @wklie and @Burkhardt_Petermann for pointing me in the right direction.
Indeed switching off Dirac solved the problem.
Again, this is however kind of unsatisfactory since Dirac was one of the selling points of the M10.
The question is for whom this is to be fixed, Roon or NAD?
Bottom line is the M10 is Roon ready certified and I believe this shouldn’t happen, right?
Thanks for your input!

[wklie (Peter Lie)]

@Wolfgang_Halter

for whom this is to be fixed, Roon

If this were a Roon issue you’d see others experiencing the same problem using different hardware.

[Burkhardt_Petermann]

It’s definitivly a problem, which NAD has in the implementation of Dirac and so NAD had to solve this.
But you can try to use outside from Roon (for example the Qobuz client) some 24/88.2 flacs with Dirac enabled for validation.

[Wolfgang_Halter]

Playing 88.2khZ files through Bluesound with Dirac enabled works perfectly. So the problem must be the way Roon talks to the M10 and how Dirca is implemented there.
I’ll open a support ticket with NAD and see if I can get any insights there.

[Wolfgang_Halter]

About the other issue that I pointed out above:

Just now it happened again that all music stopped playing while listening to a web radio stream (EgoFM)
Timestamp would be Nov. 4 at 7:41am CET.
I instantly checked the logs and it seems that exactly at this time, a new log file was created. The new log file shows that the Roon Server is actually just starting up, meaning the server just crashed and that’s why the music stopped.

Any idea how to further debug this and where or how I could find out what was going wrong, i.e. why the server crashed?
The old log file does not indicate any errors or problems.

EDIT: Just found this in my syslog file:

Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc NetworkManager[596]: [1636008071.6973] manager: NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_GLOBAL Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: ================================================================= Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: #011Native Crash Reporting
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: =================================================================
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: Got a SIGSEGV while executing native code. This usually indicates
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: a fatal error in the mono runtime or one of the native libraries
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: used by your application.
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: =================================================================
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: =================================================================
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: #011Native stacktrace:
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: =================================================================
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: #0110x5098ec - /opt/RoonServer/RoonMono/bin/RAATServer :
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73570]: =================================================================
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73570]: #011Native Crash Reporting
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73570]: =================================================================
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73570]: Got a SIGSEGV while executing native code. This usually indicates
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73570]: a fatal error in the mono runtime or one of the native libraries
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73570]: used by your application.
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73570]: =================================================================
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: #0110x509d17 - /opt/RoonServer/RoonMono/bin/RAATServer :
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: #0110x470941 - /opt/RoonServer/RoonMono/bin/RAATServer :
Nov 4 07:41:11 nuc start.sh[73611]: #0110x425704 - /opt/RoonServer/RoonMono/bin/RAATServer :

[Burkhardt_Petermann]

Do you’ve updated yesterday Roon to the latest version, which it’s not using anymore mono?

[Wolfgang_Halter]

Did the restart just this morning. So I assume the crash happened on the old version. That is interesting to know though.

[BlackJack]

@Wolfgang_Halter

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS

Sounds like you’re probably suffering from known issues with NetworkManager:

Roon Appliance Core Dump?

Roon doesn’t get on nicely with NetworkManager which manages network devices and connections both on Ubuntu Desktop and Linux Mint. You have basically two options: If your Roon core runs on a headless Linux server, I would simply install Ubuntu server which doesn’t suffer from this problem. I have done so myself. The other option is to reconfigure your Linux so that it doesn’t use NetworkManager to manage network devices. Instead it can delegate to networkd which is default on Ubuntu Server. P…

[Wolfgang_Halter]

Thanks for the reference! I just changed to networkd for managing my ethernet connection.
Will be testing this over the next few days.
Thank you all for your help.
Cheers

[jamie]

Hello @Wolfgang_Halter,

We’re hopeful that NAD is able to provide more insight into what you’re experiencing here. And we’re very pleased to see that you’ve gotten some great assistance here from some of Community’s most knowledgeable contributors!

When customers have issues with grouped Zones we generally recommend rebuilding the grouped Zone in increments to detect the cause trigger. Play to just one Zone for a bit, then add another, play for a while, then add another. This helps to reveal the inflection point for the failure.

I wasn’t sure if your comments in this thread mentioned it but, we also wanted to let you know that there’s a new Linux specific release that you may want to explore, you can find more info on the latest build here:

Roon 1.8 (Build 846) is Live!

Linux Performance Improvements Today, we are releasing an updated version of Roon for Linux, which will now run on Microsoft’s .NET runtime. This replaces the mono runtime Roon has always used on platforms other than Windows and Roon OS. These changes should significantly improve performance and scalability of Linux-based Cores, especially with larger libraries. What should you do? If you are a Linux Core user, the release requires new dependencies on your system. If you have not done so alr…