Soundcloud stutter

Hi all this is my first post. My name is Ernst and I joined the Naim family in 2020 with an Atom combined with B&W 705S2. Now upgraded to a Nova with the same speakers awaiting my 805D4 speakers hopefully somewhere in 2022. For my home office I got myself a Muso QB2 which I also greatly enjoy.

Here comes the strange thing. I’ve read some posts about the stuttering of Soundcloud in combination with Chrome-cast streaming. The comments suggest it has to do with the implementation of Chrome-cast by Soundcloud. I mainly listen to mix sets of around 1 hour when listening to Soundcloud. When selecting the Nova, which is hard wired through ethernet, the first 30 - 60 seconds it tries to start up the stream stuttering like a broken record jumping the the start of the mix. After this time it seems to have buffered enough and the mix play correct.
When I select the same mix or any other for that matter and select Chrome-cast to the Muso which is only connected through Wifi it reacts quick and starts playing without any stutter.
As I thought the streaming platform was the same for both Nova and Muso I don’t understand why the Nova has hard times to stream Soundcloud via Chrome-cast and the Muso seems to have no issues at all. Before the Nova my Atom had the same issue by the way.

My apologies if the grammar is not up to standards but I’m not a native English speaker. Regards Ernst

That sounds more like a network issue. Is the Nova in the same place as the Atom used to be? Did the Atom work OK with ethernet assuming it is in the same place? Have you tried the Nova with wifi? What does your network consist of? Are you using any wifi extenders?

That was my first thought also and therefor tried the Nova wireless.
But still the same result Nova stuttering upon buffering, Muso no issues both wired and wireless…

How far away from the router is the Nova compared with the Must? Any Wi-Fi extenders in play?

Hi @ErieZ

We’ve never been able to get anyone at Soundcloud to respond to this issue and hence so far the issue still exists. The company doesn’t seem to have any path in to report issues.

As of this month we updated all products to latest Chromecast 1.52 GM2 release and did the full Google lab recert. Annoyingly, apps & services implementing Chromecast have no cert requirements, only guidelines and hence compatibility issues arise.

In this case their Chromecast java player that they download into the Naim product uses up 100% cpu time as its constantly ‘spinning’. This makes it slow and then sensitive to audio dropouts.

Regards

Steve Harris
Software Director
Naim Audio Ltd.

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Hi Steve, I know at Naim you are aware of this issue and are trying to contact Soundcloud for quite some time now. I’ve read the topics about this issue and also tried myself to contact Soundcloud to reach out to Naim to solve this issue, without any result of course.

What made me post this topic is the fact that my Muso QB2 does not seem to have any issue in streaming the same big files from Soundcloud through Chrome-cast and the Nova does.
As I believe they incorporate the same streaming hardware base that seems strange to me, correct me if I’m wrong.
After 30seconds of hiccups most of the time the Nova gets grip of the file and it plays ok until you skip to a new mix and the 30 sec of terror :wink: starts again.

For sure I know it’s not a networking issue as I swapped the Nova and Muso connections.

Hi @ErieZ

In Muso we use a dual core 1.2GHz cpu. When casting soundcloud one of those 1.2GHz cores is maxed out, but the other one is not (due to the single threaded nature of the java based player). This allows it to appear to work, although it is still quite delicate.

On Atom, Nova etc. it has a single core CPU and if the java player takes all the cpu time in the core its using then it gets in trouble. Overall, it’s not one of Google’s finest moments in engineering.

Best regards

Steve

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This explains the issue indeed, thanks Steve.
I don’t think anything will change from the side of Soundcloud or Google for that matter. Luckily we have more options with our Naim streamers so we can listen to whatever we want :wink:

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