Over the last couple of months I’m experiencing problems playing back audio files on Qobuz at a few times during the day. This seems to be particularly noticeable with 24 bit recordings. I use Qobuz more often than Tidal but it doesn’t seem to me that I have this problem with Tidal. I couldn’t find any known current issues in the knowledge base so I’m wondering if others are having this same issue.
Qobuz doesn’t provide a mechanism to tell them about problems like this so hopefully they monitor these boards too. Any ideas on what I should do to debug this?
I’m using Roon Server on a headless PC running windows 10. Home network is Google WiFi that supports both 5GHz and 2.4GHz. Signal strength is good. Home internet is with Verizon FioS that shows 949 Mbps download and 633 Mbps upload speed so I don’t think there’s a capacity issue on my end. I have two DACs. One is directly connected to USB out of Roon Server and the other is connected over WiFi with a DAC HAT. I often group those two DACs together in Roon.
I don’t have any of these problems when playing local tracks up to 24 bit 352 kHz and don’t have these problems when I switch over to Tidal. Any ideas on what’s going on or suggestions on how I can fix it?
Thanks for the suggestion but that’s not possible given where my gear is located. I’m able to do video calls throughout the day without any problems so it seems unlikely that I have a problem with local capacity. Those calls take substantially more bandwidth than 24 bit audio.
Well that would be a bummer. Hoping that there would be some place to look at a log or other datasource to get more details on why the streaming failed. If I have to connect my core and or endpoints over a wire then the whole architecture fails. I don’t have ethernet throughout my house.
Plugging it in isn’t the only thing that they can do, just normally the first thing they ask if you CAN do.
Not permanently obviously, but for example if you could wire up the core and play to it and get no dropouts then it points to WiFi.
Streaming video and roon place different loads on the network and because one works doesn’t mean the other will.
I dont know if this will help but its worth mentioning. I have been having problems with Qobuz recently, dropouts, songs slow to start, skipping tracks seemingly at random. The weird thing is that I have just upgraded to a FTTP connection at 300Mbps so the internet performance really should not be an issue! My Core is wired to the network and to the internet.
As part of the ISP switch over I reset my router. My DNS was then reset to the default for my ISP. When I changed it back to 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) on the router and on the Roon Core the Qobuz performance improved massively.
I’ll give that a try. Interesting new behavior today is that I’m seeing Qobuz streaming 88.2/24 recordings at 44.1/16. Looked through all of my settings in Roon and verified my account with Qobuz. I hope Qobuz isn’t limiting streaming through Roon to 16 bit.
I verified this by playing the same track from Tidal and my DAC shows the Tidal version is 88.2/24 while the track labeled 88.2/24 on Qobuz plays back as 16 bit. Album is, Celebration by Thierry Lang.
Hello @Douglas_Gardner, and thanks for your report! Ged is correct, we highly recommend an Ethernet-connected core in our networking best practices guide. This would also be an important test to see if the issue is related to your Wi-Fi. In addition to that, changing DNS is also a great suggestion.
Another suggestion would be to try temporarily lowering your streaming quality under “Settiings>Services>Qobuz” and seeing if you experience less skips.
Lastly, are you getting these skips when playing to system output or to a specific endpoint?
Thanks for the reply. I’m only getting these skips when I group two zones together and stream higher bit rate recordings from Qobuz. I don’t have the problem when streaming from Tidal or my own library. I appreciate the guidance on ethernet but that’s not possible. Sounds like this isn’t a widely reported problem and there isn’t a log somewhere that I can look at to see why the stream failed so let’s just close this and I’ll live with the limitation of my setup.
Thanks @nuwriy. In my experience the Roon team (includes you of course) are super good supporting your customers so I’ll get back to you if this becomes a blocker for me. I wound up ungrouping and separating the two endpoints with one of them going to my second system. I had them grouped to make it easy to do A/B comparisons of my two DACs and that’s how this problem cropped up. It isn’t a normal use case for me but seemed curious that it was happening.
To close out this thread I’ve fixed the problem. I reworked my home network to improve the mesh connections between my Google WiFi devices. That improved stability of streaming internet music.