No more dropouts streaming Roon RAAT over gigabit ethernet

[mdconnelly]

@mdconnelly ,

I never really had problems with dropouts from the "audio file is loading slowly" problem with RAAT. I could reliably trigger the problem by playing 24/192 files with a gigabit connection but I don't have any 24/192 files so I had to get Roon to upscale lower res files to 24/192 to get the problem and I prefer to have Roon stream files at their native resolution and let the Devialet do the upscaling so I never really had the problem in "real life" with my setup. In addition, in January this year I installed an Uptone Audio ETHERRegen so since then I've been using a 100 connection to the Devialet, not a gigabit connection.

On the other hand, since installing the new Devialet FW, I have had a number of times when I have experienced dropouts. On each occasion the cause was the Devialet disappearing from the list of Roon Ready output, even though the Devialet still appeared as an output for Roon's AIR. Obviously Roon continues to see my amp but, for some reason, the RAAT connection "breaks". I can't remember noticing this problem before the latest Devialet FW. It's possible that this problem started with the latest Roon update on 20 October, 2 weeks after the latest Devialet FW, but I think the first of this sort of dropout occurred for me before the Roon update but after the Devialet update. I wonder whether Devialet introduced some new problem in the latest FW which affects ethernet and RAAT on any speed connection.

Devialet's FW release notes for the latest FW only state that it provides improvements with RAAT, not that they have fixed the problem, so I don't think we can say it's fixed quite yet.

I have seen a problem similar to what you've recently experienced.   It's only happened twice and I have reported it to Devialet with no response as of yet.  The first time, I went to listen to music via RAAT and noticed that my RAAT end point was no longer there.   The second time I was actually listening to music via AIR and the music just stopped.  When I checked Roon, the AIR endpoint was there but simply not working.   The RAAT endpoint was gone.  Restarting Roon did nothing to recover from the problem.   In both cases, rebooting my Expert Pro is what was required to get it working again.  This occurred both times since since the recent Devialet FW update.   Unfortunately, in neither case did I attempt to use my Expert Pro for any other purpose before rebooting it.  If it happens again, I will certainly try that next.

So yes, there must still be a problem with their Roon RAAT implementation that causes it to crash.  That is certainly a Devialet bug.   I have no idea if they've diagnosed it at all.   It has not (yet) happened since I moved to ROCK on NUC, but I will report it to Devialet support each time it does.