Thanks for reaching out. I’ve activated diagnostics mode for your account and what this does is upload a set of logs to our servers for review. Looking over these logs, I can see that the buffer for the TIDAL stream is filled, and the dropouts are happening on the Marantz end.
I suspect this could be the culprit here, we have often seen repeaters cause poor connectivity. Are you able to bypass the repeaters and connect the Marantz directly, or instead of repeaters, can you use a mesh-style network instead?
To further confirm that the connection is stable, you can try to play to System Output zone on your Roon Server (or another local zone such as HDMI on the Roon Server), and if you are not getting any dropouts with that, it will further confirm that the issue is getting the stream from Server → Endpoint.
Whilst this is frustrating when one service works and another doesn’t, Roon doesn’t buffer the music like other streaming services such as Netflix. Roon sends a continuous stream of PCM. Network repeaters are not advised with Roon. While some may get ok playback, they’re prone to the issues you describe and can cause services that do buffer to have the odd hiccup.
If you plan on using other softwares, they may behave differently but may ultimately cause similar issues you’re experiencing with Roon.
Might be worth looking at your network and see if you can improve it.
I have best in class TP-Link RE650 repeaters, that give a speed of over 150Mbps. The Roon Server and the Roon Ready equipment should be able to handle that.
The RoonServer uncompresses the FLAC into PCM which is a much much larger file (think WAV sized and then higher still with higher res) and then sends that in near real-time to the endpoint. Video is highly compressed and highly buffered; not really comparable.
I’ll also point out that the way Roon utilizes the local network is different than the way your streaming service providers do it. Roon is trying to match the playout buffer of the streamer (which is closely locked to the DAC clock across most interfaces). Most streaming services look closer to simple file transfer. A file transfer can handle all kinds of network issues and still perform “good”. RAAT is not a file transfer protocol as it needs to send data / receive acknowledgment that data was delivered closer to what is actually being played. If there is delay, and this can be in the milliseconds (again, something common on consumer Wifi), then the stream stops.
@Mr.Flibble and @Rugby are absolutely correct here, streaming Netflix and streaming for Roon are two completely different processes. It looks like you’ve gone ahead and cancelled your trial, so not much more can be done from a support troubleshooting perspective, but if you’d like to give Roon another try in the future, please reach out to us via our Roon contact form below, and we’d be happy to set you up with a new trial. Thanks!