@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.
I’m not totally sure which difference you are seeing but if the same Tidal bits are making their way to the dac then it shouldn’t matter. It could be one of those two is decoding and re-encoding, like AirPlay does. For th OPs case, sending Tidal data to the dac over WiFi with Tidal directly or with Roon should result in the exact same data stream making it to the dac.
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