Does Roon sound better?

I don’t think you understand what I am saying. If you have a single device that does Tidal and Room, it will sound exactly the same playing Tidal through Roon as it would playing Tidal directly. This was the question the OP asked. 

@mayoradamwest The OP isn't streaming Tidal direct his Altair uses the Lightning DS app which I mentioned in my post. So a comparison of Roon to that app and others makes perfect sense. Great nickname btw.

I get that, but it’s still pushing the same bits over. I guess there could be a very slight difference depending on network noise but I doubt you’d be able to tell. My point is mainly that Roon isn’t doing anything different. It’s just sending the same bits as Tidal to the DAC portion of the device. 

All software sounds different. Any software has better sq than iTunes. I liked DS Lightning over Mac mini running audirvana 2.x. Since I replaced my Auralic Aries with external dac with usb to running ps audio DS with bridge with Roon, sq is much better. I can’t do an a/b comparison using roon vs DS Lightning because DS Lightning won’t see the DS bridge.