Sound quality - Roon RAAT vs Roon Air

[mdconnelly]

When I was having the same problem, I bought a cheap 100mbps switch from Amazon, plugged the ethernet cat6 from router into it and then output to the Devialet.  It fully stopped the stuttering and errors I was getting at the time.  And it worked perfectly for all music.  As @David A said, it didn’t fix the problem but it was a slick and cheap workaround that had no impact on sound quality - at least to these ears.

After Devialet released the update about a year ago, they claimed it further improved the issue but did not eliminate the stuttered with hi-res music at gigabit speed - at least not for me and numerous others.  But then, a few months later and for an unrelated reason, I bought a NUC, installed ROCk, hooked it all up *at gigabit speed* and damn, it worked perfectly.  No stuttering or drop outs at all.  My prior RoonServer was a fairly powerful i7 Win 10 desktop PC so I didn’t suspect any issues with it.  But, for whatever reason, using ROCK on a NUC fully eliminated the problem for me and I now no longer use the 100mbps switch.  I did ask Devialet how/why/what that might be but never got an answer.

I went from a Mac Mini to running a NUC with ROCK. At first I had a problem with the NUC freezing up which turned out to be a faulty SSD. Once that was replaced it worked perfectly for 11 days until I went to work away from home. My wife complained about it just stopping to play toward the end of my 7 weeks away from home. I was home for a few days and RAAT stopped playing a few times a day. I ended up just using AIR.

So one man's solution is another's problem. I'm about to move the Od'A to another room where it will have to work on WIFI and I will bring my D200, which only has AIR, back to the living room so I suppose the problem will be a temporary one.

I wonder if the stoppage can be prevented by regularly re-starting the NUC. I've already set up the BIOS to start up automatically after a power failure so I could just put it on a clock switch that turns off for 1 minute every week in the middle of the night. 100Mb switch or clock switch, either way are dirt cheap solutions.

Pim,  interesting... my NUC has not rebooted once in about 8 months now (I also have it on a UPS to avoid reboots resulting from power flickers).   Roon only restarts when they release an update.   It would be interesting to see what, if anything, shows up in the Roon logs when it stops.  Does it occur with your music residing on a hard drive or via streaming from Qobuz or Tidal?   If locally, perhaps a hard-drive issue.  If streaming, perhaps a flakey internet connection?  I have had music stop when streaming to a wifi connected endpoint, but I blame that on wifi congestion.   No issues at all to my hard-wired Expert Pro.  Can't imagine it being a ROCK on NUC issue but who knows.