Hi @Robert_Greeson and welcome to the Roon forum. I’m not support, they’ll get here, but I’ll try to help. This kind of behaviour is often a sign of networking issues. It looks as though everything’s hard wired but just checking that you don’t have any wireless or HomePlug network elements in play. Do you use a streaming service? If so is local content, streamed content, or both that’s affected?
Everything is hard wired in. I have subscriptions to both Tidal and Qobuz, but the problem happens whether it’s streaming or playing an audio file from my hard drive.
First stop, can you play from the core Mac without issue, so using the player on the core machine? Again try streamed and local content to test. If that works you could also try your DAC wired directly to the core via USB.
Can you please see if you have the same behavior if you try to use System Output zone on your Mac or does the issue only impact the Node II? Do you have any firewalls like Bullguard, Little Snitch, McAFee on the Core?
He means to try and play through the speakers of the Mac Mini, as a test. You may need to enable your system to do that, which you can do through Settings->Audio and then select it as a playback zone. If the files play properly through the speakers on the Mac, then we know that the problem is further upstream,