I asked similar question a little while back so I hope the link below works
Everyday is a school day. Thank you.
Networking a house (typical UK 3 bed semi detached) is quite easy I find. Cables from downstairs to upstairs can be routed outside (external grade cable) and hidden behind rain water down pipes etc. Cables downstairs can be hidden behind skirting boards (if removable) or below them by pulling carpet back.
Cost wise my equipment and cables cost under £500.
Ubiquiti UDR £235 (these have 2 POE ports for APs and has wifi6 AP built in)
Ubiquiti UAP pro £140 for 1 (although I have 2, 1 is waiting to be fitted in my extension)
Cables/RJ45 connections £70
Time to route cables, a couple of hours.
Happy to help anyone willing to pay travel costs to wired their homes.
You can add (adopt) a Unifi switch if you run out of ports on the UDR.
My core is running wireless (M1 MacBook Air). My endpoints are hardwired, one into the router, the other in a WiFi repeater.
I have zero issues since I disabled 2.4ghz and use only 5ghz wifi
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Thank you everyone
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Roon is designed for users with a physical library. If you dont have one and your whole library is streaming then roon is painful in so many ways, one of which you describe. I bet you would have no issues playing hi res files with tidal connect over wifi? But add roon into the equation doing no dsp or anything else fancy and all of a sudden it’s not stable. And everyone blames lack of ethernet connection. In my experience roon has no interest in supporting or making improvements for streaming only users - roon 2.0 and arc are perfect examples of this. I reported a serious bug with qobuz 9 months ago that roon acknowledged and said they would fix but they havent. Unfortunately there is no real alternative at the moment but it can’t be long before roon gets some serious competition from a company who cares about their subscribers and listens to their issues. When they do a lot if people like you thinking about leaving roon can move on to something better that caters for our needs and values our good money. Hope you find a way to fix your issues
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What serious bug with Qobuz? Can’t be widespread as I haven’t come across anything major and use Qobuz all the time.
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Slightly off topic, sorry.
You are correct. There are alternatives now for those without physical digital libraries. However Roon does have a place in people’s systems who want album/artist information to hand in an incredible user friendly app with a wonderful UI.
I have A/B Tidal (Android via UAP Pro and iOS) and Tidal on Roon. Using the same DAC and cables and I find Roon sounds much better in my case.
Roon has the capabilities of recognising my DAC and gets the best from it. I also find the Android UAP Pro app sounds better than the Tidal app. To my ears anyway.
I have tried Volumio as a standalone alternative but do not find it user friendly in comparison and the UI is definitely not on par with Roon. As and endpoint for Roon, Volumio on a RPi is good.
My opinions differ I guess.
The only issue I find with Qobuz is missing albums when compared to Tidal. But I bet there are some on Qobuz that aren’t on Tidal.
That’s been a “not long” for six years now. PS audio tried and failed abysmally.
It ain’t easy.
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I think if everyone gets their infrastructure in order (WiFi, router , etc) the biggest problems Roon ever has are small hiccups.
I had disconnects and all kind of stuff when I used 2.4ghz WiFi on a Windows laptop. Basically roon (and audirvana) was unusable. It was so bad that I went back to the Cambridge streammagic app.
But after I got my hardware in order I have had zero disconnects not only roon but with every other streaming service as well.
I noticed I had 14 different WiFi networks in my immediate area. So I turned it off. And replaced the windows laptop with a MacBook and connected the raspberry pi 4 to a 5ghz WiFi repeater.
Zero issues even when I’m streaming 512DSD.
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i know its not easy, but it’s definitely possible. audrivana isn’t far off imo and upnp seems to be a reasonable alternative to raat
of course if roon took off their blinkers and listened once in a blue moon they wouldn’t have so many disgruntled customers
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I find myself using Audirvana 3.5 more and more recently. I’m resisting subscribing to anything new.
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And how much did you pay for that?
Can I guess near zero?
Can I suggest it was probably fairly priced?
Seems to me that a) we do get people with networking problems, b) those people almost universally have “basic routers from the phone company” and c) we rarely see such complaints from people who have bought better networking.
My standard refrain is that Bad WiFi ™ is unsuitable for Roon, Good WiFi ™ works very well.,in my experience, I tried with a whole sequence of routers, extenders, powerline adapters — I still have a crate full of them in the basement. Then I got an Eero system and live happily ever after. I had the internet connection and six of seven rooms running WiFi. Happy for the last seven years or so.
Some people have said my suburban environment is easier than an urban high rise. I don’t know.
All I know is that my experience disproves the theory that “WiFi can never work for Roon”.
This thread is full of the “wired is the only thing that works” crowd, with quotes from Roon’s advice.
I suggest you stop this debate.
Two simple experiments.
- Do the ugly test I suggested above, running a long Ethernet cable through the house and see if it fixes the problems.
- If it does you know it’s WiFi that’s the problem. (It’s important to know, could be other problems.) Then get a modern mesh, Eero (which is now owned by Amazon), Google or something. Try it. If it doesn’t solve the problem, return it.
If that works, enjoy the music.
If it doesn’t, come back here to discuss other possible problems.
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Upnp been there and left it to come to roon. It’s not even close.
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I agree. Got my Ubiquiti from broadband buyer.com, who set it up and manage it, the first 3 years for free. Cables were installed when the builders were in, but 4 access points cover a 2,500 sq.ft house with top to 30 Roon devices operating at 24/192. Never have any issues. Much better to have one or two more units, turn off Mesh and fix devices to the nearest AP.
Ubiquiti is also very fast compared to Netgear Nighthawk that I junked. I have quite a bit of Alexa control, most of the speakers can also be used with voice control (with Amazon HD) and when I say “Alexa, turn the living room lights on to 80% warm white” Ubiquiti is about 3 times faster than Netgear, pretty much instant.
I agree that Roon always appeared to be intended as a complete domestic audiophile home audio system and hence should be concentrating on audio quality and added features, such as voice control, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
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Not really. Unlike other software you need to realize that Core + streaming is doing:
Tidal - wifi → Core - wifi → endpoint
So every “sample” from Tidal goes across your Wifi twice and Roon is trying to keep these two things in sync. Roon stops when it detects any underrun (things out of sync). Nothing else in your house works this way. It’s incredibly taxing on a high jitter network to make this work. Unless your an RF engineer and really understand how stable and clear the RF is to determine jitter / error rate, etc. You should expect Roon to struggle in this configuration.
Get one of the wifi hops out of your network. Even if that means plugging the Core into a DAC via USB. Then see how it does.
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Not true… the RF spectrum for Wifi is shared. If you’re out in the middle of nowhere, sure, go ahead and use every available channel… But… If your wifi network has more APs than you actually need then chances are some will be overlapping channels and very much with APs you don’t manage (especially if you don’t reduce radio power). This will certainly reduce speeds and cause congestion.
RF networks need to be engineered correctly to optimize coverage vs. bandwidth (available non-overlapping spectrum). Just throwing more radios at the problem isn’t engineering 
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I have about 90 devices in my home, most fixed to 5 specific AP’s with mesh disabled. It works perfectly and pretty much faultlessly. When I had 4 AP’s, nothing fixed and mesh active, it was much less stable and effective.
There are certainly times where more radios make sense but the general advice to throw radios at the problem isn’t accurate. That’s all I was pointing out.
Also, remember, wifi really only allows for 1 thing to talk at a time (until you get into exotic and newer antenna arrays and things like MIMO). Lots of devices + mesh is horrible. Eero and others use the 2.4 for mesh and the 5 spectrum for users to allow users and the mesh to talk at the same time. I forget how default ubnt does their mesh but… yeah… lots of devices + mesh can cause issues. The broadcasts alone, especially with Roon, could saturate the mesh with enough APs and that’s before you add any clients.