WiFi issues - check your antennas

Just wanted to share this as it was the last thing I thought could go wrong. I have 4 Auralic Aries G1’s and one Femto all run and grouped through Roon. One of the G1’s would not sync with the others when grouped and kept dropping out. After countless hours looking for potential settings in Roon, DS Lightning and WiFi everything was identical for all units except there were DSP settings turned on for headphone use in Roon. After turning them off it would sync, but it still kept dropping out. During this time I had numerous emails back and forth with Mr Wang at Auralic and he kept telling me it must be Roon and I should reach out to them. It should be noted that the unit worked fine when operating with DS Lightning - Auralic’s own app. So I reached out to Roon and never got a response for 3 months - great support. 🤷‍♂️ After much testing and moving units around I concluded it could just not be Roon. There was one tidbit of information Mr Wang mentioned that made me conclude it had to be something with the WiFi reception. Roon is set up so that all processing has to be done real time without a buffer or cache, while all other apps, such as DS Lightning has a 2-4 second cache allowing for fluctuations in processing and WiFi reception. So at this point I sent the unit to Auralic for testing. Auralic concluded that everything was to factory spec and sent the unit back. Set it back up and it still was dropping out. I tested it wired to the router and it worked fine. It had to be something with the WiFi! In further discussions with Auralic Mr. Wang insisted there was nothing wrong with the unit. Then in passing he mentioned that they had used their own antennas during the testing although I had included my antennas. He also said antennas don’t go bad. Well, I had some spares so I swapped them out and, as you have guessed by now, it has worked without a hitch since.