I’ve been a longtime Roon user and have a config which includes Tidal & Qobuz subs along with a fairly good sized personal library which I groomed over the years before Roon came along. I was also a long time Sonos user and hoped that I would be able to merge Roon as the control point for all my Sonos zones but had limited success with that as Sonos never became Roon ready and I always had issues like dropouts, pauses etc. As background I’m hoping to replace my older Sonos setup that has served me very well for many years. But the Sonos gear has ten year old radios and chips and have become more unstable of late. After many calls with Sonos level 3 support they concluded I needed to upgrade my home network infrastructure. So I purchased (based on thier recommendation) an asus zen xt9 mesh setup and upgraded my ISP service to 500mb. The new network went in smoothly and I must say I’m really enjoying the 500mb boost. Needless to say, though, that did not help the issues I was having with my Sonos gear. I looked at the new Sonos connects and amps, but. (iMO) they are no longer cost competitive with the solutions available today. 12 years ago they were pretty much state of the art for wireless whole home solutions….not so much anymore. Unfortunately I recently purchased 2 Sonos “Moves” which I like to drag out onto my deck when entertaining outside and would like to keep them as part of the whole house system. Which brings me to the Wiim Pro streamers. I thought these could be a good fit and monitored the forums as they went through the “Roon ready” cert process. From what I read it’s a pretty rigorous process, so once they were certified I purchased 2 additional Pros to add to the first one based on the success I had implementing that device. As background I’m hoping to replace an older Sonos setup that has served me very well for many years. But the Sonos gear have ten year old radios and chips and have become more unstable of late. After many calls with Sonos level 3 support Unfortunately I recently purchased 2 “Moves” which I like to drag out onto my deck when entertaining outside and would like to keep them as part of the whole house system. Which brings me back around to the Wiim pros. They support airplay as do the Sonos moves. So I thought problem solved. I’ll use Roon as my “ control” software …enable the Wiims as airplay endpoints and I’d be able to cast to all my rooms including the Moves which also support Airplay.
Anyway I hooked up the 2 new pros and have them outputting via coax to two benchmark DACs in the “critical” listening areas of the house and I figured I’d use the 3rd pro to cast airplay to the Moves. After setup I tried things out and had awful synch issues with the sound.
So back to the drawing board. I had options and tried them out in series:
1: Tried Wiim’s native “sync” function and had no luck. It could not overcome the latencies.
2. Tried letting Roon take care of synchronization duties by enabling all the wiims as airplay endpoints in Roon….sync issues better but remained. Tried using the native Wiim sync function while under control by Roon and couldn’t get it.
3. Tried playing directly to all the Wiim devices and the Moves directly from my Mac and/or iPad using a “pure” Apple only stream and still had inconsistent sync. I also tried moving the Wiim grouping around as I read somewhere about Wiim having a master-slave relationship when grouped (have no idea if that’s legit) but that didn’t seem to impact anything.
So at this point I’m pretty discouraged. I thought the Wiims would be a good fit to replace my Sonos gear but still be able to utilize the Moves while having Roon as the control software. To be clear the Wiims work just fine when either using the native Wiim app or using Roon. I just can’t figure out why airplay is performing so poorly across multiple endpoints. I’ve tried to research more detail on Airplays innards but as with most product in the walled-in Apple garden there’s not a lot out there,
Any of you folks out there have any ideas?
Whoops …did a little sloppy cutting and pasting…please excuse the dupe info in my original note
I recategorized this to the Roon Software->Networking category so other users may provide their suggestions.
There may be a few reasons, including how your XT9 network is configured and other options. I don’t have a Wiim, but I do have multiple AirPort Express Gen 1 and Gen 2 devices. Roon keeps everything synchronized very well running over WiFi (my musician wife even noticed when I stream across our home that everything stays together). AirPlay running on multiple devices natively from my MB Pro does tend to go out of synch over time, so Roon does a nice job.
Just so I understand your setup, you are using the 3 Wiims all in AirPlay mode, two connected to your Benchmarks and the third connected to the Moves?
Hello Robert and thanks for moving my note to a more appropriate spot….appreciate that. In answer to your question, yes I am using Roon to stream to the Wiims and the Moves as airplay endpoints. The Wiims have the ability to “cast” airplay to other devices and that’s why I purchased the third Wiim. Unfortunatel the latency issue was even worse using that config. So what I’ve been trying to do is use Roon (which sees both Wiiims and the Sonos moves as airplay endpoints) and play to them as a group. It works but not well. Im curious about your comment on how my network config may be impacting this. I’ve checked the Wi-Fi signal to both the Wiims and the moves and have very good to excellent signals to all with very acceptable noise levels, so I’m uncertain how the new routers would be a potential issue.
Thanks
Brian
I am wondering if the Wiim “re-casting” AirPlay is the issue. As I understand how Roon works with similar network audio protocols (AirPlay, Chromecast, RAAT), it sees the endpoints (and in this case only the endpoints for identical audio protocols) that it can synchronize (which is why you cannot group RAAT with AirPlay or Chromecast, or AirPlay with Chromecast, etc.).
So the way I see (and it’s only my opinion), Roon sees all three Wiims as AirPlay endpoints and should lock synchronization across these three (similar to my home environment), but the AirPlay “recast” or retransmission from Wiim #3 to the Sonos devices is not controlled in any way by Roon, and should interference, retransmission, or other issues occue between Wiim #3 and the Sonos units, synch drift can occur and cannot be managed by Roon.
Is there any way to connect a single Move to Wiim #3 with an analog connection and see if synch is maintained with the Benchmark DACs?
There are a lot of issues with Wiims Airplay connect thing, this is their issue to solve. I suggest you go on their forum there are a few discussion on this without it not syncing to other devices well.
Those were my thoughts exactly (re: recasting) Robert and that’s why I tried the second route where I had Roon control (ie…cast) to all endpoints (2 whims & 2 moves) as airplay end nodes. As I mentioned, it did improve things, but the problem persists. Unfortunately the Moves have no analog or digital connections…only wifi, so I can’t try out your suggestion. CrystalGipsy noted there appears to be issues with Wiim’s Airplay integration, so I’ll shoot over to the forums there to see if I can find anything out. Thanks for your suggestions!
Thanks for the suggestion…I’ve dropped a note over on the Wiim forums to see if anyone is experiencing the same issues I’m having with sync.