My digital music system crapped out over the weekend. It would play music for about 20 minutes and then stop. I'd reset everything, it would play for ~20 minutes and stop again. After some trouble shooting by LDMS chief Lucas Domensky, we suspected the Lobaga Ruby USB cable I bought in April had gone bad. When I mentioned a recent ROON update Lucas noted that none of his other users had reported any issues. He was likely right as the cheap Audioquest cable I installed in the system (LDMS to Lampizator TRP) continued to work post-ROON update. Lucas contacted David Laboga who agreed to send a new cable.
Lo and behold, Lucas contacted me yesterday to say that he had three other clients whose servers stopped functioning correctly in the past week. The common thread, ALL were using ROON and had just updated. Short version of the story, Lucas, not ROON determined that some change they made messed up the buffering causing USB to stop playing after about 20 minutes. Another common thread was that most had Lampi DACS. Lucas installed a hot fix to the USB driver that fixed the issue at least for now but the conclusions I reached that he pretty much agreed with (I don't want to speak for him) were:
1) ROON's quality control is terrible. This is not the first update that broke things on my end and Lucas said other customers of his have experienced the same thing.
2) The JL Audio USB card doesn't work as well as some others. Lampi has recently switched from Amanero to JL because they believe it provides an increase in sound quality. In my opinion it does nothing of the sort and some other Lampi owners have told me the same thing. In addition, the Amanero driver is much more forgiving and less buggy than the JL.
Something interesting that came out of our conversation yesterday is Lucas said that when he gets a new USB cable he puts in on an oscilloscope to see what it looks like passing data before he installs it in his test audio system. He mentioned that many high-end USB cables don't pass data correctly on the 'scope (the cheap generic ones all do) but will work fine in an audio setup and many sound great. I'm sure the high-end cables aren't deficient technically in passing data because the manufacturers don't know what they're doing. It's the tweaks they make to get great sound that negatively impact the cables ability to function as a true USB cable. It's why some cables can be fussy in some installs (Roon and JL Audio). I found that observation interesting.
Above is just my opinion. YMMV.
Lo and behold, Lucas contacted me yesterday to say that he had three other clients whose servers stopped functioning correctly in the past week. The common thread, ALL were using ROON and had just updated. Short version of the story, Lucas, not ROON determined that some change they made messed up the buffering causing USB to stop playing after about 20 minutes. Another common thread was that most had Lampi DACS. Lucas installed a hot fix to the USB driver that fixed the issue at least for now but the conclusions I reached that he pretty much agreed with (I don't want to speak for him) were:
1) ROON's quality control is terrible. This is not the first update that broke things on my end and Lucas said other customers of his have experienced the same thing.
2) The JL Audio USB card doesn't work as well as some others. Lampi has recently switched from Amanero to JL because they believe it provides an increase in sound quality. In my opinion it does nothing of the sort and some other Lampi owners have told me the same thing. In addition, the Amanero driver is much more forgiving and less buggy than the JL.
Something interesting that came out of our conversation yesterday is Lucas said that when he gets a new USB cable he puts in on an oscilloscope to see what it looks like passing data before he installs it in his test audio system. He mentioned that many high-end USB cables don't pass data correctly on the 'scope (the cheap generic ones all do) but will work fine in an audio setup and many sound great. I'm sure the high-end cables aren't deficient technically in passing data because the manufacturers don't know what they're doing. It's the tweaks they make to get great sound that negatively impact the cables ability to function as a true USB cable. It's why some cables can be fussy in some installs (Roon and JL Audio). I found that observation interesting.
Above is just my opinion. YMMV.