Today I have experienced my first Atom spontaneous reboot while playing music from Roon. It did a full reboot out of nothing and returned to the main screen after a few minutes. I did not perform a reboot after installing firmware 3.5.0. Maybe that caused the issues. It is playing again without issues so far.
I did however experience that the integration with Roon is not as smooth as it used to be. Often the music stops playing after a minute or so and Roon would report that ‘it lost control over the audio device’. Manually resuming by pressing play then solves this.
Recently I have been doing room measurements with REW and I apply the corrections in Roon using a convolution filter. The processing of this filter during music play takes some time, typically several seconds. So what happens is that I press Play in Roon, the Atom is initialized by Roon, the cover art shows on the display of the Atom, but then it ‘loses connection’ and Roon and the Atom reconnect again after a few seconds. The Atom seems not to like this, as this morning it did not show the cover art after reconnecting, but the Roon logo. When I stopped the music and pressed play again the Atom display got refreshed and the cover art showed up again.
My gut feeling says all this does not happen when not using the convolution filter, so also the delay between Roon initializing the Atom and Roon starting to play music is much shorter.
Does anyone recognize this behaviour when streaming from Roon (on a Mac Mini in my case)?
I have experience the “lost control over device” error once on my Star. After rebooting the Roon Core it was resolved. It happened after I restarted my internet routers. My guess was that it is because the DHCP on the network assigned a new IP to the Star so Roon could no longer find it.
It is hosted on a Windows PC, but I don’t know if that should make a difference with this.
Other than that my Roon playback has pretty much without a hitch on 3.5. I did, however, power down my Star (now a few times) after the firmware update.
However, I do not use any DSP at all. And have the Star setup as fixed volume.
I’d say check it out now that you have powered down the Atom.
Thanks. I will reboot my Mac Mini as well. I never do that as it goes to sleep automatically at the end of the day and it only wakes up if I use Roon. Your reply triggered me that it would be good to reboot the Mac Mini now and then.
I’ve been asked by Naim to post an update with regard to the latest 3.5 Fw release.
Thanks for your patience while we dig deeper into reported issues with the recent Firmware 3.5 release: we wanted to analyse the situation thoroughly first.
We can confirm that despite a thorough internal and external Beta testing programme, a few bugs did slip through the net in this instance. These bugs are rare enough not to have affected any of our beta testers, and appear to be affecting a very small number of users now, according to our Support logs. Contrary to reports, products are still shipping from Naim, as so few cases have been logged.
However, even a small number of users is too many; we can reassure anyone whom has been affected that we are prioritising fixes for you. These will address the separate reported issues of ‘random reboots’, and ‘stuttering’.
We expect to be releasing an updated version of the Firmware to our Beta Forum shortly. We’d encourage you to join our Beta group, so you can test the updated software before general release, and ensure it fixes any issues you may be experiencing.
In the digital world, almost every potential set-up is unique, so the more systems we can test software on, the less chance there is of future issues occurring. E-mail beta@naimaudio.com and we’ll welcome you to the extra-special part of our community here online.
Finally, a reminder that if you are experiencing problems of any kind with ANY Naim product, do not hesitate to contact our Support team – your query will be logged and answered by our in-house team. Either email support@naimaudio.com or call +44 (0) 1722 443405 (opening hours: Mon-Fri 9:30am-5:30pm GMT/BST).
Apologies if this is all old news to you but usually networks are set up to use DHCP, which means that it automatically assigns the IP addresses of the devices on the network. These are the addresses that the devices use to talk to each other. So it can be a possibility that Roon Core still has record of the old address of the streamer and can no longer find it. This can happen if your network restarts or potentially even if you completely reboot the streamer. All depending what other devices does on the network.
This is just a guess as I have no inside info about how Roon resolves the address, but it makes sense to me to explain the error we have encountered.
Naim make a very valid point to those affected to consider joining the beta team to try the beta firmware to see if it does rectify the problem. As a beta tester i can confirm i had no issues in beta testing or now. So i am more than happy to test the new firmware…but with no problems before, the input of myself and the other beta testers may be of little use other than finding potential new issues?
I understand the catch 22 here. Not being able to test on affected devices makes it super hard to fix the code.
I have thought about joining the Beta group but here are my concerns:
As a software dev myself I am very reliant on my home network and constant and many restarts of everything can have an impact on my job.
With firmware bringing SQ changes, I am concerned that my enjoyment of the device will be lessened as new SQ’s are tested.
If a firmware brings new issues I don’t want to have to wait for the next firmware to be able to continue enjoying the system.
So basically I have experienced some bugs and inconvenience in the final firmware releases but usually find a way to work around them to just enjoy my purchase so I am concerned that loading beta firmware will make my experience worse.
I use a Uniti Star and a Roon core and it works perfectly. The connection problems are usually related to the streaming service you are using. I also, from time to time, have connection problems but this is because of Tidal, not Roon (i see that when i run the Tidal App at the same time as Roon).
Another thing to keep in mind is that Roon (and i also believe Tidal) also recently received some updates, which can be the source of issues related to any streaming device which somehow has to cope and deal with these changes and adjust things in their firmware.
By the way it may be a good idea to assign a static IP to some of your devices which may cause a problem (Roon Core, Streamer) as i have found out that DHCP causes connection issues on other items connected to the same network.
If you load beta firmware, you can revert to the public version at any time, so if you’re not getting on with the beta you’re not stuck with it. Same applies to the app.
Very founded. I also joined the beta team while my unit works almost flawlessly so far and have the same concerns. It is just the sound quality that changed and while i seem to get used to it i am concerned that changes in sound are introduced which each firmware.
I’ll see how it goes and if testing the firmware becomes a chore of course you can always sign out.
I’ll confess i have not read all the 900 posts that have gone before but would not be surprised if they highlight some of the hurdles I came into recently. The recent firmware update did seem to solve the only real issue my ND555 had been throwing up - namley pausing after each track i stream from Qobuz instead of playing an album / playlist all the way through. It did not, however, irradicate it. The system seemed to play well sunday and i had the latest app version working. Monday was a complete collapse. No music. I could navigate the app but nothing would engage playing music, either locally stored, Qobuz, or even internet radio. Roon had also lost sight of the streamer. I was without music It seems I was the victim of a tripple witching software collapse. My QNAP needed a firmware update - that often throws things off, Roon - the core of which is stored on said QNAP - requried an update, and the NAIM App itself had again been tweaked and required updating again. After rectifying this the music was back I do, however, feel the NAIM app is not running 100% smoothly and is now requiring quite regular restarts to stop it freezing. At least it still sounds great when its playing
Beta testers are now able to roll back to the current production release firmware (maybe not a comforting option with v3.5 being the current production release, but I’m sure that will soon be resolved).
There have been a couple of instances recently where I have exercised this option. One was for SQ, the other was because it was introducing a silent pause between (continuous) tracks. Restoring the production version was the remedy in both cases for me.
So there you go, there’s no reason for you not to join the beta group.
I’ve never performed a factory reset. In the case of the current firmware, I’m hoping that the shut down, cup of tea process has fixed it. Fingers have been crossed for a few days now.
It seems I was the victim of a tripple witching software collapse. My QNAP needed a firmware update - that often throws things off, Roon - the core of which is stored on said QNAP - requried an update, and the NAIM App itself had again been tweaked and required updating again. After rectifying this the music was back 
I do, however, feel the NAIM app is not running 100% smoothly and is now requiring quite regular restarts to stop it freezing. At least it still sounds great when its playing 