About ready to give up on Roon and my streamer

Thanks everybody for your responses. Some very useful information.

To answer a couple of questions posed, the Roon Core is running on my PC (desktop) and I’m using a Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 as the controller. This connects via my AT&T Fiber wi-fi (300Mbps), so I’m pretty sure that’s not a bottleneck.

The Hermes (to re-iterate) is connected to the Morpheus via I2S ethernet cable. I do have the USB module and could change back to it if there would be any advantage to that. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this particular DAC, the USB connection uses the same slot as the I2S ethernet connection, but you have to remove one module and replace with the other if you want to switch formats for this input.

As for using the SD slot to change platforms, I haven’t experimented with this yet--it’s a bit complicated and to be honest, I’m not having a lot of success understanding Sonnet’s documentation on the subject. I guess some experimentation is in order here.

If it’s my router that’s causing the problems, I don’t really know what to do about that. Not really versed in the technology of wi-fi signals and how they might vary.

From the opinions expressed here, it seems that Roon has many great advantages and the majority opinion is that you all seem to like it. So I guess it’s worth making the effort to try to solve these issues before giving up entirely. So at this point, mind still open.

Oh, and yes I DID make use of Roon's knowledge base and support forum when setting everything up, and it proved very helpful. I searched for this particular problem through those sites but didn't find a remedy I thought was useful.

Thanks again for your input.

@cooper52 

Installing Volumio onto an SD card is pretty easy. You just need a PC or Mac, a memory card reader (I use this one) and the Raspberry Pi Imager utility which can be downloaded here.

The imager is nice because it lets you choose your media OS. Sometimes there's an option to preconfigure things like wi-fi before you load the OS onto the memory card which means your device is ready to go as soon as you power it on.

One other note - if you decide to switch to Volumio or another streamer, look into using the UPnP protocol to cast Qobuz from your mobile device. For example, I use BubbleUPnP on my Android phone to log into Qobuz and stream from my phone to my Raspberry Pi running moOde. On iOS devices, I use the mConnect HD app. It preserves the sampling rate and bit depth, so it's great for hi-res audio.

I gave up on Roon, its a great library but sound wise not so good.

Look at the Innuos Pulse mini- https://innuos.com/pulse-mini/

Streams Qobuz perfectly, the Innuos Sense app is a reasonable library but sounds leagues better than Roon.

There is a used one https://www.audiogon.com/listings/lisb612e-innuos-pulsemini-network-streamer-black-52529-media-servers if you want to save a few bucks.

I haven’t been happier since dumping Roon. Both for hardware and tech service related issues.

I moved to Innuos Zenith MK3 and use their Sense app for steaming. Sense requires Innuos hardware. Their new Pulse units are relatively inexpensive and may be worth looking into.

https://innuos.com/pulse-mini/

In addition to excellent sound and intuitive app, Innuos has the best tech service and customer support of any company I have ever worked with - anywhere. Outstanding 

I gave up on Roon and then came back at it. You can read gobs about how to get a lot more out of it right here on Agon (how’s ‘dem Apples) forum. The sound from my Lumin app is a titch better but not a deal breaker. 

Roon nucleus, filtered Ethernet, bandwidth and the whole supporting web of parts matter. Taint cheap but in the world of things audiophile it’s a far lessor ticket item. This might be of interest.