Roon 2.0 (initially) broke my Multichannel. Why?

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hello Roon Team !

I’d like to notify you of something that went wrong while installing Roon 2.0 over here. Just to hopefully avoid this in the future, for me and other users. And frankly, I’d like to understand what happened. Because I hate it when things are left unexplained :slight_smile: :slight_smile: .

But first off : congrats on yet another great release ! I’m loving ARC already. Yes - I really do miss the possibilty to use DSP on ARC. Eagerly awaiting that. But still, I really see all the possibilities here. Great, and thanks a million !

Now, what went wrong : I have a NUC6i5 with ROCK as a core. Its HDMI output is directly connected to a receiver. This combination has been serving me well for (i guess) about 6 years. I However, after installing Roon 2.0, I initially lost all Multichannel capabilities. Meaning : anything surround, is always mapped down to stereo.

I remember that I always needed to set the channel layout to 7.1, in order to make this work. But after the 2.0 update, the ‘channel layout’ menu item was not at all available for me :slight_smile:

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After downgrading to legacy 1.8, all was fine again. (Thanks for both the possibility, and the clear instructions by the way. Really helpful !)/

And even after upgrading to 2.0 once more, everything was STILL fine. ‘Channel Layout’ menu available once again :

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I’d like to stress that this is not a request for help, as everything is working fine for me now.
Just a message to share my (initially bad) experience, as an attempt to hopefully avoid similar cases in the future :);

Does anyone dare to take a guess, as of what might have happened ?

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HDMI reports channels and codecs supported (including PCM). My only guess is Roon either didn’t negotiate properly or something went wonk (technical term) between Roon / Receiver and the act of rebooting through the upgrade / downgrade attempts fixed the negotiation.

What kind of troubleshooting did you do after it failed to negotiate the additional channels? I think that may be the most interesting part and why Roon couldn’t solve itself until the downgrade / upgrade.

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Yes, one can never be TOO complete on their troubleshooting reports ;-).

I repeatedly rebooted the NUC, disconnected/connected the HDMI cable, and power toggled my receiver. But no amount of all actions could solve my situation.

It was (or seemed to be…) the downgrade to 1.8 that solved it. No idea why. Perhaps I’m just that one single freak that encountered this. It wouldn’t be the first time :::).