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When I was at Florida Audio Expo there were numerous conversations about the quality of the streaming services. One subject that came up numerous times was that Roon was poor quality because of noise generated buy it’s constantly pinging the internet for information about track being played.
Can any of you guys that use Roon verify this?

I don't use Roon. Pinging the internet will not affect sound quality. The problem is people simply do not understand how computers work. Every computer on a LAN, regardless of what it's currently doing as far as a person might know about, is always accessing the LAN. Always. You can easily verify this by downloading a LAN sniffer like Wireshark and see the traffic on your LAN.

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I have too much stuff - https://www.pleasebuymystuff.com

I posed that exact argument and they responded Roon was an exception in that the amount Roon is communicating was extraordinary. They claim this has been tested and it is why Roon does not get high marks with sound quality. I know one vendor of high a quality streamer claims he heard this when playing same track from two different services.
In my gut I agree with you that bits are bits and there is now way that switches, Ethernet cable, usb cables, can make a difference.
I’m just curious what others think.

Tidal playing through Roon sounds better than Tidal alone using the Tidal app IMHO. Other than directly comparing standalone Tidal vs Tidal through Roon, I can't comment.


Also, Qubuz sounded better than Tidal IMHO so I recently dropped Tidal. Lastly, burned Redbook CD16/44 through JRiver sounded noticeably better than Tidal. I will say that there appears to be an extraordinary amount of different masterings/versions of many albums out there which makes streaming comparisons difficult.

Qobuz plays everything at 24 bit depth, this may be part of the difference in sound. May not.

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I have too much stuff - https://www.pleasebuymystuff.com

Qobuz is the favorite (for best sound) in the press. We all know we can trust the press lol

While I was playing around with a raspi 4 as a music streamer with Roon and JRiver I was doing a lot of ssh sessions with the pi and I was frequently looking at my WiFi monitor to dig out the IP address of the pi. I noticed that Roon seemed to pull down a significant amount of whatever track it was playing and buffer it. When I would go back to a prior track I didn’t see expected usage spikes on my WiFi. Going to a new track I’d see the usage ramp up pretty quickly. This wasn’t the focus of my experimenting so I might be incorrect but it makes me wonder if Roon is doing smart things with buffers. I definitively didn’t see any significant Network usage when Roon was playing normally.

Re local flaq file vs Tidal 16 bit - I also seem to favor local flaq to Tidal 16 bit.

I am finding QoBuz to have excellent sound comparable with local files. I do not have much to compare with since I have limited high-def stored locally, but a comparison with one recording at the same bit rate/depth indicated that the QoBuz streamed version seem very slightly closed in. But this is with a very resolving DAC (a borrowed Chord Qutest).

David

What you are saying is true for wired networks only.
Wireless networks are bad for audio streaming.

Why are wireless networks bad for streaming?

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