Trouble remembering Airplay receivers

I have two B&W airplay receivers and until a month or two ago worked flawlessly. When their zone played, they played. Today, they barely play and i am reaching out for help.

Some background:

  • In Jan i moved to the Roon Core to a new PC.

  • It recognized the B&W A5 (kitchen) and A7 (living room) and i recall all working

  • A few months later, the A5 and A7 were unavailable on Roon. I turned on / off the devices and all was well.

  • This happened maybe once/twice again.

  • I also found that sometimes Roon would play and show the “pause” bars indicating a track playing, but the play line at the bottom of the PC screen showing time of track elapsing showed no time counting down and i would get no sound. Here a restart of Roon fixed the issue.

  • More recently, i could not get the A7 recognized with a restart, so i did a factory reset on the A7. I needed to do the same with the A5. In the screen shot below, this led to a “new” LV Room A7 and a “new” Kitchen A5. The old ones remained remembered in the system but were not “available.” Since i could not delete them (…issue for another request?), I renamed them to “__” and “” so they would not distract.

  • This resolved the problem for a little while but when i returned from a trip last week, again i needed to on/off the devices to get them recognized. They also now play for around 30m before they become “unavailable.”

  • Today i removed Roon from my PC, downloaded a fresh copy and restored files from a back up but that didn’t make a difference. The devices played for an hour and then dropped out and appeared to need to be turned on/off again.

  • Interesting - the B&W app doesn’t recognize them until i factory reset them. I am not sure if there were recognize before these issue began. I only noticed when i need to factory reset them.

  • The Apple TV receiver is having no issues.

  • I have two network names " Front" and “Back.” These are suppose to be seamless - same password; the “Back” is fed by a Range Extender. The B&Ws (not the Apple TV) are near the “Back” zone, but when i set up i linked to the “Front” zone since that was what had always worked. I added the “Back” zone about 4 months ago.

Hope i am not overwhelming with information but wanted to be as comprehensive as possible. The B&Ws are probably used more than my dedicated listening room so the loss is frustrating. I know they can work perfectly so i think this can be fixed - but i am at a bit of loss now and hope you can help! @support

Hello @hshrader,

Thanks for contacting support, I’d be happy to take a look over this issue you are facing. When you mention that you are unable to remove the old A7 and A5 speakers from Roon, is it because you not have the option to disable them in settings or that even after pressing disable they still remain? I have attached a screenshot of where to find this setting:

The two networks that you mention “Front” and “Back”, can you please confirm if they are using the same IP address range? Have you attempted to set static IPs for the B&W speakers and are still seeing the issues? I am thinking here that the IP address may be automatically changed by the router. Furthermore, what happens if you temporarily unplug the range extender and “Back” network and move the B&W speakers closer to the “Front” network, are there still dropouts then? Please test the above suggestions and I look forward to hearing your results.

Thanks,
Noris

@noris

Dear Noris, many thanks for your attention and offer to help. IP address confusion did not occur to me.

On your first point, to which I can reply immediately, the end points of the old A5 and A7 do not appear in Settings. They only appear when I access the Zone in which the they were originally playing. When looking at that zone, they and the new endpoints are appearing. I do wish that when they don’t appear in Settings they allow would not appear in the Zone. Right now none of the B&W endpoints appear in the Settings - they won’t until recycle on/off or factory reset them.

Any issue or suggestion here? I will have to explore your other suggestions later.

Thanks!

I seem to have fixed the problem but not sure how, but i think the IP issue was on point.

I got into my router, id’ed the Devices. When i clicked on the Kitchen A5 IP address, it took me to the B&W intranet site. I renamed the Kitchen A5 - sort of as a refresh attempt. I did the same with the A7, but oddly, on the router’s site, only the A5 appeared renamed.

I went to Roon and found that the old version, or maybe all the versions were replaced and all worked for…now 6 hrs.

More later if there is anything to report.

Hello @hshrader,

Just want to check in with you here, have you had any more issues with the setup after changing the IP setup? Please let me know!

Thanks,
Noris

Many thanks! All stable and robust. The IP thing must have been the issue - not sure how it was actually resolved, but it is working!

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