Playback to M10 Pauses Spontaneously

Support
1

Core Machine (Operating system/System info/Roon build number)
Dell Windows 10 PC running Roon

  • Core i7-6700K 4GHz 16GB RAM no SSD
  • Main drive 2TB HDD, music lives on 2nd 2TB HDD
  • Intel 1219-V Ethernet interface
  • Roon 1.7 build 511 64bit
  • About 2k albums, 25k tracks, using <700GB storage
  • I use Qobuz and Tidal

Network Details (Including networking gear model/manufacturer and if on WiFi/Ethernet)

  • Netgear N700 Router
  • WAN connection to xfinity cable modem
  • Single LAN connection to Switch 1

Switch 1 (office) connects:

  • Router
  • Switch 2 (living room)
  • Switch 3 (office)
  • NAS 1
  • NAS 2
  • Print server (D-Link DP-301P+)
  • Mac Mini 1

Switch 2 (living room) connects:

  • Switch 1
  • Oppo BDP-93
  • Bryston BDP-2 (driven by Roon)
  • TiVo Bolt VOX
  • Harmony Hub

Switch 3 (office) connects:

  • Switch 2
  • Switch 4 (bedroom)
  • Dell Windows 10 PC running Roon
  • Mac Mini 2
  • Squeezebox Touch (driven by Roon)
  • Rotel A14 (driven by Roon via USB using WASAPI)

Switch 4 (bedroom) connects:

  • Switch 3
  • Oppo BDP-83
  • TiVo Premier
  • NAD M10 (driven by Roon)

All switches are TrendNet TEG-S80g Gigabit (the older ones with 2 status lights for each of 8 connections). I believe all ethernet cables are Cat6.

Audio Devices (Specify what device you’re using and its connection type - USB/HDMI/etc.)

  • NAD M10 (wired ethernet)
  • Squeezebox Touch (wired ethernet)
  • Bryston BDP-2 (wired ethernet)
  • Rotel A14 (USB)

I usually control Roon using an iPhone 6 or an iPad mini.
I believe the Roon core and all Roon apps are up to date. Ditto the NAD M10 and Bryston BDP-2 software.

Description Of Issue
I use long playlists, looped. The playlists and all tracks in them are on the HDD on my Windows PC. They used to reside on NAS 1. Moving them doesn’t seem to have made much difference. I believe these tracks are all 44.1/16 FLAC.

Playback to the NAD M10 pauses spontaneously, in a few minutes to a few hours after starting. I don’t think it’s ever played for more than 10 hours without pausing. Sometimes I can just restart playback by hitting play in the Roon app. Sometimes when I hit play the M10 reboots spontaneously. Sometimes the M10 disappears from Roon’s list of players until I manually reboot the M10. Also, the M10 has spontaneously rebooted during playback (without pause/resume) at least once.

I bought the M10 through Crutchfield and they sent a replacement unit which I’m not using. As far as I can tell both units have exhibited the same problems.

Playback to the Bryston BDP-2 also pauses spontaneously. I believe this happens less frequently. I believe this occurred occasionally before I added the M10 to the system.

I have not seen spontaneous pauses in playback to the Squeezebox Touch.

I have seen playback pauses and other issues with USB to the Rotel, but I’m not concerned about that. The Rotel is often in standby so Roon doesn’t even see it.

The issues that I’m most interested in resolving are the ones involving playback to the NAD M10. I mentioned the pauses with the Bryston BDP-2 because they surprised me and seem to indicate that there may be issues outside the M10.

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Hello @Dean_Shea,

The NAD M10 is not Roon Ready certified at this point in time. We are working with NAD to resolve all outstanding issues before certifying the device. Until the device is certified, use of the Roon Ready input should be considered “as is”.

The next time you experience this behavior with the Bryston BDP-2 zone, let us know what local time it occurred along with the track that was playing at the time of the playback stoppage. We can then enable diagnostics mode on your account in order to capture advanced logging in the time around the incident.

-John

1 Like
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Hi John,

Thanks for your quick response.

I saw another pause on the BDP just now, after it had been playing for almost 5 hours. It occurred at about 12:34 CT.

I was playing Blue Monk from the Bill Evans CD Conversations With Myself.

It resides at M:\flac\Jazz\Evans, Bill\Conversations With Myself\04 Blue Monk.flac on the PC that runs my Roon Core.

The playlist is M:\flac\playlists\Jazz.m3u.

I happened to be looking at task manager and the Roon desktop at the time of the pause (I know: I promise I have a life). I noticed small spikes in CPU (~5%) and GPU (~15%) activity. Also, Roon seemed to have momentarily lost track of the BDP: the current zone was the BDP, then switched to Select an Audio Zone, then back to the BDP, but playback didn’t resume.

That’s what I know, please let me know if I can help further.

Thanks again,

— Dean

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Hello @Dean_Shea,

For some reason the support servers are unable to retrieve logs from your Roon Core.

So we can move forward, I was hoping for now you could use the directions found hereand send us over a set of logs using a shared Dropbox link.

-John

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Here you go!

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Hello @Dean_Shea,

Thanks for your patience while the tech team took a look at the logs you provided.

We can see the “pauses” in your logs clearly, thank you for sharing the timestamp information.

It appears that there is some sort of “hiccup” occurring on your Roon Core that is causing the network connection to drop temporarily, resulting in music playback stopping as you have noted.

We can tell this because when these “hiccups” happen, Roon loses connection to both the M10 and the BDP-2 even when playback is only active on one of the devices.

I would first try changing the network connection on the PC to see if this is interface related. If your Roon Core is on WiFi, change over to ethernet. If it’s on ethernet, change over to WiFi.

It would also be useful to use another Mac or PC to run your Roon Core instance to isolate the issue further.

-John

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Hi John,

Thanks for your response! No worries about it taking a couple days: between holiday time off and (I expect) a pulse of Christmas-related new customers I figured you all are plenty occupied.

I’ve also been talking with folks from NAD and BluOS. They also suggested moving from wired Ethernet to WiFi. First I moved only the M10 to WiFi and didn’t notice any difference in frequency of pauses. After a day I moved the Roon Core to WiFi (my music library is on an internal drive) and have not seen a spontaneous pause or reboot since. My experimentation has so far been only between the M10 and the Core, but I just now (appx 10AM Sunday) started playing high-bitrate streams to the Squeezebox Touch (still wired), BDP-2 (ditto) and M10.

I’ll let you know how that goes. Running the Roon Core on one of my Mac Minis via wired Ethernet also has a ring to it. Maybe in a couple days.

Thanks again,

— Dean

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With the M10 and my Roon Core PC on WiFi, playback has been rock-solid to the M10, the BDP-2 and the SB Touch. Today I moved my Roon Core to a Mac mini on wired Ethernet, and will send another status update in a couple days. Meanwhile, let me know if you’d like a new set of logs from my PC Roon installation, including the time since I moved to WiFi.

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Hello @Dean_Shea,

I don’t think the logs will be of much use here, as far as troubleshooting this network issue is concerned. What we could interpret from the logs was that the network connection was going down, we cannot infer why this behavior is occurring.

Your tests using ethernet on the Mac mini should shed some light on wether this issue is being caused by the ethernet infrastructure or your Roon Core PC, let us know how it goes.

-John

11

After about a day of running distinct long playlists to the M10, BDP-2 and SB Touch (BDP, SB and Core on Mac Mini all wired, with playlists and music library on a NAS also on wired Ethernet, and M10 on Wifi) with no hiccups, I returned from lunch to find playback paused on all three devices. Where do logs reside on a Mac system? Please let me know if you want me to send a log set, or otherwise how you’d like to proceed.

12

Hello @Dean_Shea,

I was able to enable diagnostics mode on your account for the Mac Roon Core. The next time it contacts the support servers, it should upload the diagnostic logs.

-John

13

Hi John,

At the suggestion of the BluOS folks I’ve tried moving the NAD M10 back to wired Ethernet. I think that has decreased stability a little bit, so playback paused on the M10 and the BDP-2 again this afternoon. Playback is still paused now, 3:11 PM CT, on both. The BDP-2 was playing Two-Part Invention, for keyboard Not 3 in D major, at the time of the pause.

I noticed an interesting comment in another thread. In “Anyone have Roon and BluOS working flawlessly?”, in March of 2019, Solomente mentioned switching from a TrendNet switch like the ones I’m using to a TP-Link switch. Should I consider doing something similar? What about the switch would be causing a problem? Maybe there’s another thread you could point me to?

Thanks again for your help,

– Dean

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Networks are defined by a bunch of standards and networked devices are therefore hard- and software black-box solutions that implement those standards. The TEG-S80G as well as the TL-SG105 are both consumer grade switches. The main design goals for such products is usually that they have to be cheap and feature rich (for the marketing). This combination doesn’t go well sometimes and standards might get in the way too.

Trendnet advertises the TEG-S80G with “Up to 70% energy savings with GREENnet technology” (for a device that’s rated with a max. power consumption of 4W). Did you notice the absence of a standard mentioned here?

TP-Link advertises the TL-SG105 with “Green Ethernet technology saves power consumption” (for a device that’s rated with a max. power consumption of 2.3W). It seems to me, they did a better job here technically as well as in the marketing (no saving figures). While they also not mention any standard, Green Ethernet technology was a superset of the 802.3az standard. Yes I agree, the target audience for the product might not know that.

So it seems that there is a good chance that the TL-SG105 is indeed more standards compliant in this regard. As the techniques used for energy saving include reducing link speed, link power or even turn off ports completely, there is a good chance too that the problems you described might occur when devices that do not comply to the same standard, or a standard at all, regarding energy saving get combined.

Sadly I’ve never seen any manufacturer of networked audio products mentioning the network related standards their products comply too. So it is try and error testing from us customers to figure out which combinations do work and which not.

PS: For both switches the wall-wart power supply will probably waste more energy than that can be saved trough GREENnet / Green Ethernet.

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