[If you are short on time, go to the last paragraph. Otherwise, the in-between stuff might be worth a few giggles…]
John, thanks for the additional thought. Here’s some more info that might affect your troubleshooting: the Rock sits in the virtual “center” of the house, along with: cable modem; router (Nighthawk 8000); and a NAS, MacMini, two Apple Airports now decommissioned and serving as Time Machine backups. [the last set of stuff is uninvolved with Roon]. Hanging off the new i7 Rock (256GB SSD and 64MB RAM) are an 8TB and 4TB external drives, both mounted in Storage.
The “Roon stuff” is in the other side of the house, far away from the Rock. There, housed in one cabinet, are: my receiver (MRX720), an Oppo 203, a Yggy, the Ropiee, a Netgear switch (late model), a Netgear Access Point; Roku, Apple, and Sonos boxes. Attached wirelessly (outside the closet) are a MacPro (Control), iPad (also possible Control), iPhone 10 (also possible Control), and an Echo. I have a “gizmo” that now wirelessly drives my formerly-wired subwoofer. And as far as wiring, its Cat 5e and up Ethernet, and all parts of the Roon signal path are Cat7. BNC cabling twixt Ropiee and Yggy, and RCA to receiver. And speaker wire to seven speakers (five are Paradigm in-ceiling mounts) along with the subwoofer
All to say that there’s a lot going on there, maybe too much, but that’s the current state. Also, moving various parts around is a short-term hassle (with the possible exception of the Rock), and its a long-term near-non-starter.
I also observed last night that the DigiOne was cooking quite nicely on top of the Yggy. I looked because for the first time since installation, Roon suddenly wouldn’t recognize it. I rebooted, moved it to cooler climes, and it returned, but the lag and false starts did not go away last night.
[Today’s events]
I now have the Roon DSP on, but only headroom (+3dB), and upsampling (compatibility only). I have dabbled with Sync delay for the full range (0-5) and it did not seem to improve the connect success.
To my sense, “syncing” in the broad usage, is the issue. It does not seem that Roon, Yggy, my network, and/or Control are ready to go at the same time.
[Time passes while John now attempts to recreate false starts and record sequence of events…He goes quickly between high- and low-quality tracks, Roon and TIDAL tracks where problems had appeared…]
Well, d**n! Flawless! I guess this is another “nevermind” but I’m sending you the entire post since it’s already written and if this comes up again, you’ll have my setup info.
My guesses as to cause(s) are:
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Overheated Ropiee. Note to file: never put anything on top of a Yggy that you don’t want to ruin. Problem abated once off griddle AND cooled (overnight sleep)
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Reduced Roon overhead. For reasons I don’t know or understand, I had it to upsample everything to max. Thought by eliminating some overhead might help.
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Way down the list is a Flawed network setup, but I don’t see the flaws. Late model equipment, over-specced, peppy Internet (100MBps on wireless MP).
You might keep this open a day or two while I stress the system more, but as of now, all seems good. Sorry to spend your time; still on the steep part of the learning curve.