· Roon ARC on CarPlay with my Pioneer car stereo show that music is playing but no sound is coming through the speakers, this happens with both a wired and wireless connection from my iPhone 17Pro. This is an intermittent fault that has been going of for years.
Tell us about your home network
· UniFi Cloud Gateway Fibre 10GbE to USW Flex 2.5G 8 PoE to USW Flex 2.5G 8 - ROCK is connected to this last switch. This system was installed about two weeks ago and replaced an ASUS RT AX88U. The issue was the same with the ASUS Router. Internet speed is 260Mbps down and 100Mbps up.
My wife works from home and does use a VPN to connect to her work servers.
On this particular occasion I had just dropped my children at school, ARC worked fine on the journey to school but when I got back in the car to drive home there was no sound, I had only stopped for less than a minute to walk my son to the gate. This was around 9:00 Australian Central Standard Time, Friday 31st.
This particular album is a locally stored album on my ROCK NUC10i3. Incidentally I’ve had issues with locally stored music when I was overseas in the UK, locally stored music would only play for 30 seconds and then stop, music from TIDAL was OK.
That symptom points more toward an ARC playback or transport issue than a general audio output problem, especially since it can be intermittent and has shown up across different cars and routers.
To get a clearer picture, a few things would help us narrow this down:
When this happens, does ARC still show the track time advancing normally, or does it appear to be paused while the car stereo says it is playing?
Is the Pioneer unit doing any audio processing of its own, such as “pause,” “mute,” or phone-call handoff behavior when you reconnect after a stop?
Do you see the same behavior if you start ARC playback again from inside the car after the issue appears, or only when resuming the existing session?
Does this behavior only impact the head unit? If you try to use ARC to play to the ARC device’s internal speaker, does the issue reproduce?
If you can, please also tell us the exact Pioneer model and whether the car stereo is connected through CarPlay only or also has any Bluetooth audio path active at the same time. We can take it from there.
Yes, ARC does still show the track time advancing, it definitely is not paused on either the Pioneer display or if you look at ARC on my iPhone.
No, no other processing is being done or phone call handoff. I am just purely listening to music, on this particular occasion I had got out of the car to take my son to the school gate and had left my phone connected. When I restarted the engine, the Pioneer head unit went through its usual boot up procedure and CarPlay automatically engaged ARC started to play but no sound was coming out.
Yes, I cannot get rid of this behaviour with out restarting the car engine. I do not have to restart ARC on my phone.
I am not sure about this one but I’m pretty sure that if I turn off the engine ARC will play through my iPhones speakers. I will make sure I try this out next time it happens.
The unit is always connected by CarPlay either wireless or wired to my iPhone.
Too be honest I’ve always thought this was an issue with the Pioneer’s software and its implementation of Apple’s CarPlay so I have never reported it until now.
As a side note, I have noticed that when I start my car with wireless connection to my iPhone and open my garage door with its remote at the same time, ARC will not load i.e the Pioneer’s screen just shows “loading”. The Pioneer unit seems prone to RF interference.
Thank you for the clear and thorough report. This should be sufficient for our team to investigate this more deeply.
If you’re willing to try, can you reproduce this same symptom with another audio-dependent app (like the Tidal/Qobuz native apps, YouTube Music, Spotify, etc.)? That would clear the head unit software of any guilt.
Otherwise, your description points to ARC not successfully handing off audio to the head unit.
No rush at all. It is intermittent and there is no point forcing it.
Please note the date and time when it happens, and whether ARC plays through your iPhone’s own speaker at that moment. Both help us line it up against your server’s logs.
