Am trying Roon out, but having trouble with sound quality through airplay as output. Am hearing consistent clicking sounds on playback. I’m an A+ and Ammara4Tidal user and both of them work fine through airplay.
When I play direct via USB into the DAC, things are fine.
My setup is simple: software (Roon, A+, etc.) is on a Macbook Pro (2013). It sends the music to Airport Express (first generation; yes it’s old, but as said it streams A+ and A4T without a hiccup). Toslink cable connects the AE to my Exogal Comet DAC.
Just downloaded roon today. It is still analyzing my library with respect to “Background Audio Analysis Speed.” Could that be taxing its ability to render non-stuttering Airplay?
I want to use AE so I can sit in my listening position and explore Roon on my laptop. Unfortunately my iPad is too old to serve as a remote, so I’d really like to get this solved. Thanks for any insight you can give.
You can try turning off analysis temporarily and see if that helps. If you’re still having problems, let me know and we can definitely look into this further.
We have fixed some Airplay bugs for our upcoming 1.2 release, although these are more related to the latest Airplay devices on the market. It may help you inadvertently, so mentioning that just in case
Also worth noting that there are an increasing number of reasonably-priced, high quality network audio endpoints available. If you’re up for some DIY fun, products like iQ Audio’s give pretty incredible bang for the buck and, like all RoonReady products, will support bit-perfect playback of a much wider range of audio content than Airplay devices.
Turning of the analyzer feature makes no difference. I hear lots of pops and clicks when streaming Tidal in Roon over airplay. This doesn’t happen when I use A+ or Amarra4Tidal or anything else I’ve sent to my AE from my MB Pro, for that matter. So it seems to be a Roon issue. Thanks for reaching out.