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Author Topic: Synchronized playback from a single sound card to 3 zones (multi room audio)  (Read 2447 times)

Nosecrash

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During my testphase I encountered several issues which I could not fully workaround:
JRiver has this brilliant feature of zones. That is the biggest selling point for me since I can build a whole house music system with standard hardware. Unfortunately, the zones are not always in sync!

Zone 1 is made up of channels left and right, zone 2 of channels surround left and surround right from the same sound card but sometimes zone 1 is ahead of zone 2, sometimes it is the other way around.
I used different PCs with different output methods (wasapi, direct sound) over analog and hdmi connections. The result was always the same. For a limited time, the songs played in sync, but after 10 or 15 minutes they started to drift apart.

Is there anyone out there who actually got synchronized multiroom audio reliably working? Do I have to buy a special sound cards for that?

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Nosecrash

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Ok, let me get this straight: no one out there is using jriver for synchronized audio output? I thought that was the main idea behind zones! Did I buy the wrong software?  >:(

What about the JRiver staff? Do you have any advice on this? I would really appreciate your support.
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mwillems

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During my testphase I encountered several issues which I could not fully workaround:
JRiver has this brilliant feature of zones. That is the biggest selling point for me since I can build a whole house music system with standard hardware. Unfortunately, the zones are not always in sync!

Zone 1 is made up of channels left and right, zone 2 of channels surround left and surround right from the same sound card but sometimes zone 1 is ahead of zone 2, sometimes it is the other way around.
I used different PCs with different output methods (wasapi, direct sound) over analog and hdmi connections. The result was always the same. For a limited time, the songs played in sync, but after 10 or 15 minutes they started to drift apart.

Is there anyone out there who actually got synchronized multiroom audio reliably working? Do I have to buy a special sound cards for that?



I've used zonelink to link zones on the same soundcard and have gotten perfectly synced output that way; it's obviously a completely different story with trying to use multiple soundcards (that did not work well for me at all).  So I'm not sure what might be causing your issue.  What kind of soundcard are you using?  

In the meantime can I suggest a diagnostic workaround?

In your example you have two zones in two rooms; as a diagnostic, setup a third zone for both rooms together: you'd then have one zone for room 1 only, one zone for room 2 only, and one zone for room 1 and 2 together.  In the third zone, set output format to 5.1, and just use DSP studio's parametric equalizer to copy the left and right channels to SL and SR respectively.  That should give you a stable sync unless something is very wrong with your soundcard (otherwise multichannel output would never work at all).  You might need to adjust the delay once to account for line delays and distance, but you can do that in parametric equalizer too with the delay filter, and the delay should remain fixed.  

If that doesn't work, there's something wrong in your soundcard or your signal chain after your soundcard that's introducing variable delay;  If it works, you know the issue is probably not with your soundcard, but is instead somewhere else (either in the windows mixer or in JRiver's zone syncing); but you'll also have a workaround until the issue is completely sorted.
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