Roon will not play. When I start the desktop app, it says it can't find the Roon Server (my iMac). I click submit, which gets me into the app, but then no tracks will play whether they are stored locally or on Tidal. I get an alert saying "Starting playback on your audio device... this may take a moment!" and then the music never plays. I have 3 Devialet Phantoms connected and have never had an issue.
Describe your network setup
Ethernet via Sonic
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
2
I have had a LOT of issues with my Phantoms over the last couple of updates.
Had to perform multiple resets and power cycles of them to get them back online.
Have you tried any resets of them yet?
Thank you for your patience. We’ve pulled diagnostic logging from the affected RoonServer to pinpoint the timestamp from your screenshot.
In logs, the Devialets fail to initiate playback or drop out unnaturally for two reasons:
In the first case, the track buffer from Tidal times out. The media doesn’t load fast enough to distribute the audio stream to the Devialet endpoints, prompting the Zone to stop.
In the second case, the timeouts occur within the local network, between RoonServer and the Devialets themselves.
We’ll need to troubleshoot both RoonServer’s upstream connection to the router as well as the relative arrangement of the endpoints in the network.
Please elaborate on your network topology. How are your RoonServer and Devialets connected to one another? Do you have any additional network hardware, like managed switches, access points, or second routers?
Try testing to the System Output, playing the same content from Tidal that fails to play on the Devialet endpoints. From there, hardwire a single Devialet to the same router as RoonServer via ethernet. Try to play to that endpoint. Are you able to reproduce the dropouts and playback failures?
I have Sonic fiber internet coming into my 1BR apartment in the bedroom/office.
The associated router is connected to my iMac via an ethernet cable.
I have one Devialet in my bedroom and two paired in the living room.
My Ring camera system has a Chime that extends the wifi network.
Additional comments:
The entirety of my Roon usage is 10-20% local files and 80% TIDAL.
Most of my daily playing is shuffling one giant playlist of my entire Roon library.
I’ve noticed that the lags have been happening recently, after Roon and Devialet uprades of various kinds.
I also understand that TIDAL recently changed some key aspects of its service, related to audio file format.
Wiring a Devialet Phantom to the router will/would take me a few days to move everything around, but in the meantime, it does seem like when I change the speaker to System Output (the iMac itself), the connection doesn’t drop out in the same way.
My guess/inference is that the two timeout causes you list above are effectively the same issue. I.e., TIDAL times out, and because that’s the majority of my library, when it does, the connection to the Devialet Phantoms times out. I’ll keep my eye on this and try to execute the steps you mentioned, but my suspicion is that recent changes to Tidal, Roon, and Devialet all the same time are potentially the cause, with TIDAL being slower as a first domino. I’m getting the “Improve” prompt on many of my Roon playlists that involve TIDAL, so I wonder if those playlists are “going searching” for legacy audio file formats on TIDAL that TIDAL recently retired?
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
7
Great information.
As the owner of a pair of phantoms running paired I have found that the last two Devialet updates have been dreadful.
However years ago I hardwired both of mine as I found their WiFi performance to be very sub par compared to say my Chromecast units.
I would get regular timeouts and stuttering when streaming just 16/44 material.
These all disappeared once wired to Ethernet.
@Mark_Gibson, not sure but the Chime may be causing WiFi interference with your ISP router. As you can play fine with an Ethernet cable connection on your Mac, can you disable the Chime and see if that improves anything? From what I read about the Chime, this is an option for large locations needing to extend WiFi for Ring devices. However, in a smaller location such as your apartment, it may be causing interference with your ISP router’s WiFi.
Also, if the Chime is providing WiFi to anything else in your network, note that it uses much older WiFi technology that may limit the connection speeds and reliability to those devices.
Per a suggestion in this thread from another user, I uninstalled the Chime temporarily to see if it was affecting the wifi connection. It had no effect.
Generally, it’s not practical for me to run ethernet cables to my Devialet Phantoms because of the number of them and their location. But confirmed sometimes I am able to play Roon directly from the iMac when connecting to the Devialets is fits-and-starts.
That said, sometimes (say 50% of the time?) when I start the Roon app on my iMac these days, I get an error saying it can’t find the RoonServer… but I am using the iMac itself as the Roon Server, and it’s connected to the router via ethernet cable.
So… my working hypothesis is that there’s something glitchy about the Roon app that’s new, and may be more about the connection to TIDAL than to Devialet. Thoughts?
Are you running the Hot Fix Build 1445 of Roon Server? There were some issues specific to the Mac that may be affecting your system.
Have you tried replacing the Ethernet cable between your Mac and the router, or changing the port you are using on the router? Sometimes the cable or port fails.
Another thing to test included in @Robert_F’s response - we’re seeing multiple IPs being reported from the Mac, could you test out disabling wifi on the machine, and only having an active ethernet connection?
Just disabled the wifi. I had turned that on thinking it might help this issue specifically but it doesn’t need to be on, since the ethernet connection per your note is direct.
Tidal’s API rejecting requests to play content because it the track is unauthorized for whatever reason. Two common reasons for this type of generic unauthorized failure are:
changes to distribution agreements that have removed a particular file format version from Tidal with another
The latter cause most commonly presents it’s own error in the Roon UI, so we can assume some of the failures you’e encountered are related to your current Tidal subscription tier.
When you encounter a Tidal track failure in Roon, try playing it in the Tidal web player at the same resolution. The example we found in logs was an MQA track, “The Way to My Homeland - Latvian Radio Choir / Sigvards Kļava”
When did you create this playlist? Please see my comments above.
Moving on, the second type of failure in logs affects grouped Zones only. More specifically,
grouped Devialet devices. In this case, timeouts and sample dropouts (WiFi interference) accumulate sufficiently to kill the audio stream.
The good news is, there aren’t upstream connection errors to Tidal’s servers, which is trickier to resolve. All traces indicate the issue is within the local network. RoonServer’s ability to reach all three Devialet’s simultaneously is jeopardized on the network. You can try prioritizing RoonServer’s IP address in any router settings around traffic management of Quality of Service. You can also try to increase line-of-sight to the Devialets, avoiding other sources of interference and favoring higher positions in the room.
