I hear you and I feel similarly as I tend to be a leave things as they are unless they have a fundamental issue and then instead of fighting it I usually just move on to something else as I feel fighting against the nature of something is just going to wind up with compromise at best and a who knows what at worst.
I asked the question in the context of others experience since I realized my history of DAC didn’t leave much in the way of room for experimentation. I guess my Amber 3 I could have but was far from ready then.
Interesting to know that even with DACs that support native DSD in that may not be the prefered sound.
The TotalDAC’s DSD board is a $400 option on a $12K DAC, and honestly it’s not bad, though the pass through only works if volume is at maximum, so I assume it’s converting to PCM internally for anything else.
I just had a marginal preference for the converted material on that DAC, and it’s trivial in Roon to set it up to convert specific formats.
Flying from Phoenix to Austin today, and very reliably streaming FLAC files from my Roon ROCK via ARC, using inflight WiFi. ARC is pretty sweet when it works!
ARC is coming along nicely. I like to download my playlists or specific albums or artists locally so I don’t even need to have WiFi. Plugging it into the car and I get to listen to new stuff.
I can’t even use it standing in my house with my phone connected to wifi, any more (it used to be fine), always reports slow connection, won’t play anything.
I assume this issue is my shitty upstream bandwidth, but it’s not that terrible.
Yes, it’s a very common reported issue on the forums with all the usual, uninstall and reinstall it type fixes, and it randomly fixing itself for people.
I’ve just written off the feature as unusable at this point.
Every time I’ve had issues with it, I’ve wound up resetting the client, which sucks as then I have to download all my offline content again but it usually resolved the slow/no connectivity. It’s temperamental let’s say. lol
But once connected it stays working. There’s also new updates as some ISPs were having issues, I think IPv6 related.
I had no issues from day one in ARC connecting, then I had to switch routers it broke. I did nothing as I barely used it given it would routinely crash outside of the home. Then one day it worked again. It has its own moods is my theory…
I started having severe drop out issues with ROON a few weeks ago and switched over to my Innuos Sense software player. My yearly ROON subscription is set to auto-renew in July and after a few weeks of using Innuos daily i believe i am ready to leave ROON for the foreseeable future. I simply can’t justify spending the money on ROON knowing damned well how much i appreciate whatbthe Sense software does
I have been reading up on this UPNP thing and i’m wondering if my Pi2 and SoTM streamers will play with the sense software. Cn any of you much more technically oriented people help me figure out how to switch my non-innuos streamers over to work with the Sense software.
I think i’m on the correct track but i have no idea how to go about trying to swap over my Pi2 and SoTM?
They do, but I don’t know enough about the Sense SW to tell you how that would work. If the MK3 can be set up as a server and it can broadcast out UPNP then both the Pi2AES and the SoTM would work.
Ok good, i am pretty sure i’m on the correct heading/track. This is good news John, because yes the MK3 can be used as the main network thingy to everything else. Or atleast I’m pretty sure it can. I might have to work with the innuos software engineer out in Portugal to figure this out but i think i may be able to walk away from ROON and connect at least 4 out of the 6 systems to the Sense software. This owuld be good.
UPNP is in that just about good enough camp of protocols. Not talking about audio quality, but rather usability.
It and Squeeze basically do the same thing, server negotiates a URL that the streamer can download the stream from, and it’s all just a Binary download from there.
It can require more from the streamer (than I ASSUME RAAT does), since the streamer has to decompress the audio if it’s compressed (even flac isn’t “free” to decompress), although the streamer could convert everything to uncompressed before the download.
Linn uses it as the underlying protocol for their stuff as well.
The issue is that there is no requirement for what features the streamer has to support or what protocols, so you can have streamers that don’t support skip or seamless playback. And although you can query a streamer for capabilities, it’s not sufficient to determine if a particular feature is available when playing a specific format.
Most Linux based streamers all use the same software, so it’s less of an issue, but my NS1 had different behavior over UPNP than my Pi2AES running Ropiee. And there is no way to for example query the maximum supported bit rates for a specific format on the attached DAC.
The server can work around some of this, by effectively constructing an uncompressed stream on the fly, but I have no idea how many do.
The only real feature you loose over RAAT in practice is multi room streaming, RAAT has additional metadata to synchronize playback across devices. Though my guess is even there in practice you could do a good enough job on a home network over UPnP.
I’ve been on and off vaguely writing my own server/organizational software, and DLNA/UPNP has been my target, largely because everything (except the ones I actually use, my Roon only Optical Rendu and my TotalDAC streamer which only has Roon installed on it) supports it.
Been having an “Interesting” issue with roon, that made my secondary system unusable for week or two.
It’s not strictly a Roon issue, more a network environment issue.
I have no wired ethernet near my secondary system, so I use a wireless bridge to get ethernet to the totalDAC, this has worked fine for years (used the same solution with the NS1). I recently swapped to an EERO mesh network, to address an issue with my Wifi router randomly locking up (it was infrequent, but annoying and difficult to diagnose).
After the swap at various points in the day I could either play entire albums all the way through, play a couple of tracks, and have roon skip through everything else, or simply not be able to play anything.
What’s “interesting” is UPNP playback had no issues.
As far as I can tell the issue in the end was simply errors on the network, the wifi performance at that location was fine, so it was something to do with the bridge talking to the mesh, and RAAT not being very tolerant of errors (as I said UPNP which is just a file download worked fine).
I swapped bridges, didn’t help, thought it was a USB cable issue (it wasn’t), in the end I bought a second EERO router and used that to bridge to Ethernet, which works fine.
The interesting observation here is just how sensitive RAAT seems to be to network quality, and I wonder if that’s why some people experience a quality difference.
This was both Qobuz and local files using Roon, Hires and Redbook.
As I said using UPNP to stream the same files from the server worked fine.
It’s as if RAAT just bails on any network error, which I could see if it was over UDP and they have their own error correction in place.
Generally what would happen is it would correctly negotiate the Bitrate, the DAC would change to that setting, then the song would just not start and skip directly to the next one. Sometimes it would start playing and skip mid track. The protocol negotiation is probably over a TCP interface, which would explain why it’s fine until it tries to start streaming.
It does behave exactly the same way when it can’t read from Qobuz though.
I saw a massive improvement in stability and speed when I switched my Roon Server over to the same switch that my streamer connects to. Switching to ROCK was the other big improvement. It worked adequately before but would get periods where I’d experience long delays between tracks sometimes.
I don’t think it’s the file transfer itself but something in the protocol that’s awaiting a certain (performance) flag to clear before it continues? Who knows. Your particular symptoms at least when they happen to me which is rare nowadays are usually resolved by a reboot of ROCK and the Sonore streamer.
