A subscription to Roon doesn’t interest me. It appears Audirvana + doesn’t play nice with the bridge. Lots of drop outs.
So for you DS Junior users using the bridge. What software are you using to feed it? I am currently running a mac mini in the system.
Thanks for any thoughts.
As long as Tidal support isn’t necessary I think you’ll find JRiver to be your best choice. While I use Roon primarily for its Tidal integration, I mostly use JRiver to send my locally stored files via UPnP to my source component.
Thanks much. I will check JRIVER out.
FYI. I started the roon trial last night just to see if the DSJ bridge was ok and it seemed fine. No drop outs as I was seeing with Audirvana. It might be that I didn’t get the settings figured out on Audirvana before my trial period ended. But at least I know the Bridge can work they way I have it configured.
Tim
Last night Roon was running via bridge without issue. Today, terrible. Tons of drop outs. Reboot of the dedicated mac mini and the DSJ have no effect. Media does not matter, FLAC rips of CD quality, DSD64 and an attempt to play and MQA from 2L all experienced unlistenable drop outs and pops.
The bridge is 2 for 2 with Audirvana and now Roon. USB works fine FWIW.
Roon works flawlessly on my Mac Mini with Bridge II. Same with JRiver. I agree with Seegs in that I use Roon for Tidal and JRiver for LAN files since it sounds slightly better. Just keep in mind that your midi settings can be the source of a lot of headaches. Make sure the PS Audio driver volume is set to 100 at all times if you ever want to play DSD at all. This slider will on occasion get out of whack, I have no idea why, and I’ll have to go back and reset it. You might look there. I find USB, especially with LANRover, and an excellent USB cable to be on par with B2, FWIW.
Not sure what you mean by midi settings. Is that a Roon comment or a iOS comment (ie high sierra)?
Thanks for the feedback
It sounds like a network problem. Those can be the biggest pain to solve. I think you said you were connected directly to your Mac Mini. I have my 2011 Mac Mini connected to both my router and the Bridge II (one uses a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter) and it works fine. Many people swear by static IPs but I use DHCP and have never needed to resort to static IP addresses. You might try connecting both the Bridge and the Mac Mini to your router (or a switch connected to your router) using DHCP to set the addresses to avoid possible issues with out-of-range static IPs or conflicts. Turn everything off and start up again beginning with the router, then switch (if using one), then Mac Mini and the DAC last. Cables, routers and switches can all cause problems (I once had a gigabit switch go bad–still worked but throughput dropped for unknown reasons).
Edit: The DHCP suggestions assumes you are connected to a router at some point so the router can assign addresses.
stevem2 saidIt sounds like a network problem. Those can be the biggest pain to solve. I think you said you were connected directly to your Mac Mini. I have my 2011 Mac Mini connected to both my router and the Bridge II (one uses a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter) and it works fine. Many people swear by static IPs but I use DHCP and have never needed to resort to static IP addresses. You might try connecting both the Bridge and the Mac Mini to your router (or a switch connected to your router) using DHCP to set the addresses to avoid possible issues with out-of-range static IPs or conflicts. Turn everything off and start up again beginning with the router, then switch (if using one), then Mac Mini and the DAC last. Cables, routers and switches can all cause problems (I once had a gigabit switch go bad–still worked but throughput dropped for unknown reasons).
So I changed my Mac mini - DS - NAS connections to a new switch located near my rigs and everything runs pretty good.
I finally gave up trying to make sense of the connectivity. I scavaged a router, set the address to 10.10.10.1, setup the dhcp pool for 10.10.10.0/24. Reconfigured the mac mini ethernet adapter and the DSJ to use DHCP.
Everything reconnected like it did with the crossover cable and the ethernet 10/100 switch experiment.
Play back through the bridge is not dropping out any more for 44.1 or DSD64 using Roon. audirvana on a mac book pro was able to play through the bridge as well.
So for whatever reason, a router and DHCP appear to have made a difference in bridge play back. Go figure. The network is still isolated as it was with the switch or crossover cable implementations.
Thanks for the comments and taking the time.
Tim
Is there anything happening in your home during the day that doesn’t happen in the evening? Do you have children who are streaming music, gaming, etc? For me I found overall better music performance when I made sure all my equipment involved in pushing music file used static IP. But I see you’ve had better luck with dynamic IP. Do some investigative work on what else is going on in your home network when things aren’t working well. From my experience when there have been dropouts it was always a network device.
The network between the dedicated mac and and the dac is physically isolated. No other activity other than data between the mac and the dac. In addition, there is nothing else running on the mac other than the music server software. No user activity, email, browser etc.
I have been doing data communication since the async, bisync and SNA days and been involved with IP since the beginning. For the life of me I can’t think what in the bridge or mac would be happier with a router and DHCP versus direct connect with static addressing. Makes no sense. But it does make a difference. A first for me, I’ll tell you that.
Pings from the mac to dac showed zero packet loss no matter how long I ran it or how big a ping packet I sent. very strange.