I live in Australia. I am currently in Brazil. The network connections are not wonderful between the two. Also, in Australia, network speeds can be less than optimal. If I watch a YouTube video, YouTube tunes the quality to match the available bandwidth, so the video plays, regardless, largely, of the bandwidth. Not so Roon ARC. Rather, it stops and restarts once or twice, then sends me a message saying “Poor Connection” and stops. Which tells me there is no intelligent tuning of the transmission bandwidth based on what’s available. My DAC at home plays at DSD512, but mp3 is better on the road if that’s what it takes to play the music… Can you please build some intelligence into this, so it’s usable beyond optimal bandwidth availability? YouTube shows us this can be done.
Thanks,
Richard
It depends on whether the codec can do this. Modern video codecs have adaptive data rate built in but I don’t think any audio codecs do, at least not for music. Speech codecs do AFAIK
(But you are aware that you can configure the data rate in ARC for cellular use? It’s static, but at least possible)
I see it does have the ability to change how it gets transmitted. Setting it to “Bandwidth Optimized” for wifi does flick it to a lossy format, which makes it play. Thank you. I was not aware of those options. “Automatically pick best quality” is a fail.
Thanks,
Richard
“Automatically pick best quality” is not a great label - for cellular, it chooses the “Balanced” setting, which means lossy 256 kbit/s for local files on the core and typically 320kbits/s for Qobuz/Tidal (which may be too high for poor connections), and the original quality for wifi.
and in detail:
For clarity, “Bandwidth Optimized” was needed to make wifi work.
For wifi? That would be very poor wifi. Anyway, it depends completely on the network connection for wifi or for cell