When I group ROON zones I’m getting a significant degradation in sound quality in comparison with using the same ROON zones individually. To be specific, here is what usually happens: when I group two zones the track starts playing normally and then in about 20 seconds this audible “fuzzy distortion” artifact starts to be noticeable and it goes in and out from that point onwards. From now I’ll refer to this artifact as “fuzziness”. Just to reiterate, I NEVER encounter fuzziness when using individual ROON zones, only when I group them. When I ungroup zones and continue playback of the same track on the same device fuzziness always disappears. The behavior is similar regardless of whether I play locally stored files in my library or streaming from Qobuz via ROON.
Devices that I observed this behavior on when grouped: Chord Mojo (original version), RME ADI-2/4 Pro SE, Astell&Kern A&ultima SP2000T DAP.
My ROON server is Nucleus One with Samsung 1TB T5 Portable Solid-State Drive connected via USB
Roon Server version 2.0 (build 1483) with latest version installed.
I also use “default” in Device setups for each of the audio zones.
My Nucleus is connected to the internet with the Ethernet cable. ROON zones use WiFi and the average speed is is 400 Mbps download 8 Mbps upload.
I’ve recorded audio outputs of Chord Mojo and RME to illustrate the fuzziness.
“UNgrouped” files are tracks when the ROON zone is un-grouped - never having any fuzziness
It’s definitely subtle but I can hear it, but maybe it’s just me? Are you skipping to around 20 seconds from the beginning of the track? Also fuzziness is only present in some of the tracks. The most obvious one is the last track in the folder entitled “RME Qobuz stream grouped - fuziness starts at 0.20 .mp3”
Would anyone who opened the folder and listened let me know if you can hear it?
Thanks everyone for your input! Does anyone here use group zones here on a regular basis? And if yes, do you hear any discernible difference in quality vs using same zones individually? I should add that when I use same two zones but UN-grouped (pressing play at the same time) there’s no degradation of quality. It only happens if zones are grouped.
At one time I was experiencing a situation where there was a delay between grouped zones. Some of the zones were close, kitchen and patio, where the kitchen had a sliding glass door opening to the patio, so you could hear both simultaneously depending where you stood. The delay was so small It was hard to tell that it was a delay, but it was noticeable. A few things changed so I am not sure which fixed it. I put a 100 ms group delay on all my zones (Audio/Device Setup/Advanced Settings/Zone Grouping Delay), about the same time I did an software update. Could this be your fuzziness?
Are some wired and some wireless, I would play with master clock. Set one device to be the highest and the others default until you find which combo works best, the one that has the most latency to start with might be a start so one that’s on WiFi. Then one will be the master the others clock to. Anything on WiFi will also have more network latency with some more than others I know from my experience A&K DAPs WiFi are not the best.
