Sound quality - Roon RAAT vs Roon Air

[Saint0]

I was also plagued by dropouts using RAAT to my Expert Pro 440 via gigabit Ethernet.  It continued even after the Devialet OS/firmware update last year although the frequency of the dropouts was much improved after the firmware update.  This was using an i7 Win 10 PC running RoonServer.  But using the 100mpbs switch eliminated the dropouts and sounded just as good as gigabit ethernet so I was content.

But then my PC started having issues so I eventually bought a NUC 8i7 and installed ROCK.  I can’t explain why, but no more dropouts with RAAT via gigabit ethernet.  None.  Roon has been ROCK solid.

YMMV, but it made me wish I switched to ROCK on NUC years earlier.  It has made the care and feeding of Roon so much easier.  (Caveat: I do know of other NUC users that still have occasional dropouts and if you read the Roon forums, this issue is certainly not confined to Devialet owners).

Regarding AIR vs RAAT… I do hear a slight difference but not enough to have clear preference based on sound quality alone.  I tend to primarily use RAAT because I’ll occasionally group playback with another Roon Ready endpoint in my home which I cannot do with AIR.

I'm glad switching to NUC 8i7 fixed the dropout issues. I'm using Roon's Nucleus+, which should work as well if not better than NUC, but it started to have RAAT dropouts after updating to Roon 1.8. Roon claims Devialet never fixed their network stack issues handling raw PCM from RAAT. Both Roon and Devialet advised using a 10/100 switch for the D250. It appears the Devialet network stack has problems handling gigabit ethernet.

I've also started to notice certain Tidal MQA tracks have repeatable subtle skips (or very short dropouts) with Devialet AIR, which Roon also unfolds to 96/24 PCM. I played the same tracks using the Meridian 218 endpoint to the D250 and no skips.

Gigabit Ethernet is a mature tech and ubiquitous, it's pretty disappointing that Devialet can't seem to have a solution for that.