Airplay, Wiim and group synch issues

[bom13]

I’m a relative newcomer to the Wiim product line and recently purchased 2 additional Pros to add to the first one based on the success I had implementing the first device. As background I’m hoping to replace an older Sonos setup that has served me very well for many years. But the Sonos gear have ten year old radios and chips and have become more unstable of late. After many calls with Sonos level 3 support they concluded I needed to upgrade my home network infrastructure. So I purchased (based on thier recommendation) an asus zen xt9 mesh setup and upgraded my ISP service to 500mb. The new network went in smoothly and I really am enjoying the 500mb boost. Needless to say, though, that did not help the issues I was having with my Sonos gear. I looked at the new Sonos connects and amps, but. (iMO) they are no longer cost competitive with the solutions available today. 12 years ago they were pretty much state of the art for wireless whole home solutions….not so much anymore. Unfortunately I recently purchased 2 “Moves” which I like to drag out onto my deck when entertaining outside and would like to keep them as part of the whole house system. Which brings me back around to the Wiim pros. They support airplay as do the Sonos moves. So I thought problem solved. I also use Roon as my “ control” software which also supports Airplay endpoints.

Anyway I hooked up the 2 new pros and have them outputting via coax to two benchmark DACs in the “critical” listening areas of the house and I figured I’d use the 3rd pro to cast airplay to the Moves. After setup I tried things out and had awful synch issues with the sound.

So back to the drawing board. I had options and tried them out in series:

1: Tried Wiim’s native “sync” function and had no luck. It could not overcome the latencies

1. Tried letting Roon take care of synchronization duties by enabling all the wiims as airplay endpoints in Roon….sync issues better but remained. Tried using the native Wiim sync function while under control by Roon and couldn’t get it.
2. Tried playing directly to all the Wiim devices and the Moves directly from my Mac and/or iPad using a “pure” Apple only stream and still had inconsistent sync. I also tried moving the Wiim grouping around as I read somewhere about Wiim having a master-slave relationship when grouped (have no idea if that’s legit) but that didn’t seem to impact anything.

So at this point I’m pretty discouraged. I thought the Wiims would be a good fit to replace my Sonos gear but still be able to utilize the Moves. To be clear the Wiims work just fine when either using the native Wiim app or using Roon. I just can’t figure out why airplay is performing so poorly across multiple endpoints. I’ve tried to research more detail on Airplays innards but as with most product in the walled-in Apple garden there’s not a lot out there,

Any of you folks out there have any ideas?