Since I’ve been using Roon which is when I joined this community back 3/19 so not “years”. Most of my endpoints are Raspberry Pi’s running bridge. Some with hats. Some not.
This helps point to an endpoint issue and not a network issue. It should be noted that in a group if 1 device has an issue then Roon almost always stops playback to all devices since it can no longer sync them. So one bad ethernet cable can stop groups from working.
This has nothing to do with speed, reliability, etc. CAT specifications, when properly terminated only deal with the bandwidth on the wire.
Not more bandwidth but that’s only half of the story. All video codecs are adaptive and lossy. Bit perfect audio is not adaptive. If you lose a bit then you get noise. There is no way around it. Lose many bits and you pops, crackles, screeches and many other undesirables. This is why Roon will abruptly stop playback if it detects an under-run; that is detecting that the DAC is not playing back in real time with the stream of bit perfect bits. This can be because of packet loss, the network not keeping up with the stream, the responses (ACKs) to the streamed packets or a number of reasons. This is why you can have plenty of raw bandwidth but it still doesn’t work for audio. And, no, generally going to 10 gig will not solve this issue unless there was something wrong that got fixed simply by swapping out the switch.
What switches? Do you stats on packets per second, buffer / queue depth or misses, latency? Again, it’s less about bandwidth and actually delivering packets on time and without loss.
Sonos, as well as being significantly less bandwidth, creates its own adaptive mess network. This allows it dynamically deal with network degradation. It’s a very resilient and robust system. RAAT does none of this.
I don’t understand this question. I believe your SOtM supports the following compatible protocols with Roon. RAAT, Airplay, and LMS (although, maybe not on your version). You could try Airplay. It does work differently than RAAT but you’d be limited to 16/44.1(or 48).
I’ve grouped… 4 or 5… all RAAT no issues. I don’t do it very often though.
SOtM does not support Sonos. Only Sonos supports Sonos but you can try Airplay. You’d have to enable Airplay on the SOtM and then enable the Airplay endpoint in Settings → Audio
It’s not just that but I would assume each vendor is able to tweak the Roon Bridge slightly to account for how much buffer and jitter they can deal with. The Raspberry Pi, being that it is using Bridge directly from Roon, would be the most generic or reference implementation. But I don’t work at Roon so I’m guessing here.
Good.
Test 2
Surprising, yeah… I’m starting to think that your experience supports that this is a SoTM problem. Although, I have no idea what the SOtM could be doing with more than 1 on network to destroy the other.
new questions:
- Can you downgrade the SOtM to the previous firmware?
- Have you tried pairs of 2? As I mentioned before, Roon will generally stop playback if 1 device has an issue. Meaning, if you have 3 then your pair combinations are
1 & 2
1 & 3
2 & 3
(I hope I did that right)
This would eliminate 1 of the devices being the issue (instead of any of them). - Can you stream different tracks to each device? That is, using each independently and not in a group? If this works then you almost 100% have a SOtM issue as there really should not be an issue with streaming separately or in a group other than Roon needs to keep the 3 in sync which can fail if one of the devices isn’t keeping up.
Good luck but… yeah… based on this and your other issue… Sounds like SOtM has an issue with multiple of their devices on the same network. I hope they fix it faster than the last issue you had.
BTW, as far as suggestions… I really like the Allo products paired with RoPieee. I would also look into the Sonore products which I rarely ever see anyone complain about.
