Roon RAAT and "An audio file is loading slowly"

[mdconnelly]

I use two HP ProCurve J9085A switches (6 meters apart) linked with Gig copper and vlan trunking between them. My router is a Palo Alto PA-220 firewall (with a Cisco DOCSIS cable modem in front), but nothing is directly connected to the firewall other than the "inside" interface. All layer two is handled by the two switches and a Dlink 505 wireless unit in bridge mode for the Android remotes.

The two switches have each 24 100BASE-T ports, two 1000BASE-T and two SFP slots (that are not used at the moment). The switches are completely silent and fan-less. Roon Core is connected to one switch while the Devialet amp to the other, both on 100Mbps ports. So there is a gigabit link between the switches, but what matters seems to be the ports devices are connected to. Ethernet cables are cheap Cat5 with no shielding.

I suspect that if the transfer from Roonserver to Devialet is 100mbps, all will work.   I've yet to hear from anyone that is successfully playing Roon RAAT to Devialet at gigabit speed with hi-res content, yet Devialet says it works for them.

Tomorrow I will receive a 100mbps switch.  I'll switch my PC running Roonserver back to gigabit speeds to router and put the 100 mpbs switch in front of the Devialet which should mean 100 mbps between router and Devialet.    We'll see if that works.  

Sure wish Roon Labs would weigh in...

OK, Roonserver PC reset to 1 gbps network speed.   Unplugged my ethernet Cat6a cable from my Expert Pro, plugged it into a cheap ($9) 5 port 10/100 ethernet switch and then put a short cable between switch and my Devialet.    Works like a charm even with 192kHz, 24Bit music files.    Take out the new switch and plug the original ethernet cable back into the Devialet (e.g. running 1 gbps network), dropouts and error resume.

So it appears that the machine running Roon Core does NOT need to be using a 10/100 network speed, but the Devialet does.   This is still a hack but it's only $9 and it works.    Not sure if there really is a downside to doing this (short of it simply being a problem that needs to be fixed).  Best of all is it allows me to go back to running the PC running RoonServer at gigabit network speed which helps greatly with backups and file transfers.

I'll post to the Roon forums as well...