Sound quality - Roon RAAT vs Roon Air

[Pim]

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.