I am a new user of Roon, partly as I I have recently upgraded my streamer in my living room from Sonos to Auralic Aries G1 and seller recommended Roon to me. I really love the Roon software experience, but miss having the true multi-room experience throughout my downstairs that I got from Sonos. I have therefore been thinking of changing out my Sonos 3 in the kitchen for something like the Naim Muso QB 2, but I just want to check that this is going to function in the same way as I had before with sonos in both rooms i.e. with Roon providing the same multi room experience between Auralic in the lounge and Naim in the kitchen.
They are both Roon ready endpoints so I believe they should group together, but is the experience of multiroom same as sonos i.e. with sound delay etc? Just want to know others experience of Roon zones before I shell out a lot of cash if its not going to deliver exactly what I’m after.
I had sync problems when I tried to use a Bluesound streamer in one room and a PS Audio streamer in another. This was particularly bad if there was a change of sample rate. To my knowledge, the issue with Bluesound has never been resolved (though I would love to be told that I’m wrong).
On the other hand, I have had no sync problems between the Roon core ( a Mac mini) used as a streamer and either the PS Audio unit or my current dCS Network Bridge.
If your seller recommended Roon (and the seller is a real shop) I would ask for the loan of a second unit to test that it works.
I also have Sonos around the house, and have found that, for sheer reliability in multi-room use, it’s hard to beat.
Thanks for the info @Jack_Bolton. Interesting to note the different experiences between kit. I had also considered Bluesound as an option too, but definately not a contender now based on your feedback.
Good idea about doing a home trial. Unfortunately the shop I got the Auralic from does not sell Naim. I have heard the return policy for John Lewis is quite good especially if you buy online. Perhaps I will give that a go and return the Naim if it doesnt work as hoped.
Should work ok, although I found on my Naim Atom that it had 1000ms delay that I had to account for in the sync playback settings. It appears Naim is not feeding this delay back to Roon so it does not have any idea about it.
Having 4 Mu-so’s scattered around the house (Mu-so 2nd Gen’s and Mu-so QB 2nd Gen) I’m happy to report no issues with ROON and groups for multi-room playback. Sometimes I also use a pre-made group in Google home for multiroom (especially when using streaming services that aren’t integrated in ROON) and this has been just as reliable too.
Is that a setting in Roon somewhere? Like is said am new so still getting to know half of what it can do. Would be good if I did have sync issues to be able to manually adjust it if necessary. Although hoping that it wont be an issue in the first place
Yes it’s a setting per device. In my setup I have The Naim Atom, Bluesound Node2 and 3 pi’s that all run Roon over RAAT, all but the Naim where in sync with each other so had to adjust the Naim to bring it in sync. Even then it tends to drift whilst all the others are rock solid. I put in a ticket about it but heard nothing back, even though they replicated the behaviour.
I have 13 zones in my house (including outside zones) using blueos devices (NAD CI720s and NAD CI580s), Sonore devices (Signature Rendu SEs), Lumin Devices (U1 and U1 Mini), and my McIntosh MX160 AV Receiver and can play all of them in sync. Roon is awesome for multi room and supports HD and DSP capabilities Sonus can’t touch so is far superior IMHO. For me the bluos sync issue was solved quite a while ago but there still seems to be a few people in the community who seem to have some issues.
Plenty of testing over the weekend as well as playing with new live radio from 1.7. Have got perfect synchronisation between naim and auralic. Definately think roon is doing the perfect job of allowing be to upgrade from sonos for high quality streaming and multi room.
