Marantz Melody player - stream keeps cutting out.

[MisterTea]

I recently got a Marantz MCR610 music player which has the facility to stream music from Spotify. Allegedly. I upgraded my account to premium to take advantage of this service, but have not been able to listen for more than about 5 minutes (usually much less) before the stream cuts out.

Has anyone encountered a similar issue. It seems like it might be a problem on the Marantz side because Spotify is happy to stream wirelessly to my laptop all day from the same hub that the player is wired to.

Thanks in advance for any observations or advice.

[Joe]

Have you tried Marantz tech support?

[MisterTea]

I have indeed, Joe. I launched a dual assault on the support communities while simultaneously looking into the issue at my end.

The response from Marantz was to suggest performing a factory reset and re-initialising the unit. I did this and thought that all was well but this turned out not to be the case.

So here's what's happening... The music player is attached to my home network via a Devolo dLAN/wLAN device that uses the electric mains wiring to connect to the base station elsewhere in the house. The bandwidth is lower than it would be if the unit was connected directly by ethernet, and this seems to be a factor. If the Melody is the only thing using the Devolo device all is well, but if I connect wirelessly at the same time a fight for the lion's share of the available bandwidth ensues, and the Marantz melody loses every time.

I discovered this when I turned on my laptop to send an email to Marantz telling them that their solution had worked. At that point Spotify had been running uninterrupted for almost an hour, but the stream failed about 30 seconds after my laptop

For now, I have turned off the wireless function on the Devolo unit and attached a separate WiFi base to it. That seems to ease the problem slightly, but it's not a solution.

I may have to bite the bullet and plumb in an ethernet cable that links the Melody directly to the base station.

[MisterTea]

(Duplicate post removed)

[MisterTea]

So. After extensive testing, I found out that the problem lay not with the Marantz hardware, but with my Spotify account.

When I initially set Spotify up on my home computer, it pulled in all my iTunes playlists, over a hundred of them, the largest running to 12,743 tracks (at the last count).

This is where the problem lay. Perhaps it was because there's a 10,000 item cap on playlists created in Spotify - or maybe it was just too much data for the Marantz player to digest. Whatever. Getting rid of those iTunes playlists from Spotify (where, frankly, they were neither wanted or needed) has fixed the problem, and Spotify on the Marantz now works without always crashing a few minutes after it starts.

Looks like an issue with the robustness of the API, one way or another.

The guy from Marantz was hugely helpful during the lengthy correspondence I had with him getting to the root of this problem with Spotify. What a relief! I was worried he might just ask me if I've tried Spotify tech support.

[timwestbrook]

I too have experienced the cut out problem when streaming spotify music to my Marantz-6R610 CD receiver. I am directly connected to my home network through ethernet and do not have massive playlists so I have no idea what the problem is but after cutting out the red LED flashes which indicates an amplifier malfunction. It is a major dissappointment as everything else about the machine is fantastic. Sporify works fine on my PC so I reckon it is a fault in the Marantz player. I will try to speak to their tech support before returning the M-6R610 to the shop.

[Flutefriend]

I have a similar problem. Spotify Premium works fine on my PC (albeit with the odd slow download speed glitch), but despite being connected via an ethernet cable my new Marantz M-CR610 fails to stream tunes from my playlists until I've waited ages for them to load. Initially too I was getting a message telling me that my playlists (which aren't very long and don't contain any iTunes songs) were empty when they are clearly not. In all other respects the Marantz seems fine, although I can't access FM radio, presumably because the aerial isn't long enough. It's its failure to work properly with Spotify which is most frustrating. 😞

[timwestbrook]

If its any help I took my player back to Richer Sounds where I bought it and explained the cut out on Spotify which produced the amp malfunction red flashing light.

Fortunately the sound room at the shop was occupied so instead of setting it up to test they gave me a new Marantz player which has been working fine ever since. I therefore deduce that the original player had a malfunction from manufacture. 

I wouldnt want to be creating playlists from the remote control, its far to faffy but using my pc keyboard I can create playlists easily that are immediately available on the Marantz player.

Good luck.

TW

[Flutefriend]

Thanks. Which branch of Richer Sounds was it, please? Mine came from the Reading branch.

[timwestbrook]

MIne was from Richer Sounds Watford.

[Flutefriend]

Thanks - Reading exchanged mine for another new one, but the problem remains. I suspect it may be incorrect settings on my Billion router and I await the firm's technical support advice. It was Marantz' advice to do so, having tried several things including a factory reset and firmware update.