Without Roon, when you start a playlist or song, my understanding is one of the speakers streams from Tidal or spotify or where ever and acts as a server in a sense for other grouped endpoints. The stream goes from the outside world to a speaker.
Under Roon, is that how it works – Roon starts a Sonos speaker streaming? OR, does the stream go to Roon Core and then from there to the Sonos Speaker?
Thanks for any insight!
Rob.
With Roon all audio transport is via the Roon Core then out to the audio end points.
Yes that makes sense. When you go into the Sonos native app while using Roon and look at an end point, the song “name” is “Roon.flac” to that points to what you are saying.
So if we expand that to say 5 Sonos speakers in a group… there is a stream from Tidal going to the core and then is there 1 stream out to 5 speakers or 5 separate streams? I am trying to assess network traffic.
Roon uses the same basic mechanism that the official Sonos app does for grouped playback. I don’t think there is any other reasonable way to do synchronized playback to the Sonos speakers.
My understanding is also that Roon sends data to one speaker and that speaker re-distributes it, but it’s possible the topology is more complicated than a simple ‘star’ setup in which the ‘master’ speaker sends data to all the others. I don’t really know one way or the other.
I guess that is what I was looking for confirmation of.
The difference I am trying to understand (with limited knowledge) is whether there is some kind of broadcast stream to all speakers vs. point to point to point.
I’ll continue to work with support on my issue but since Sonos is bulletproof and Roon frequently “loses control” of Sonos, there is some fundamental difference in network traffic.
Thanks!