When I compared Roon through my Auralic Aries G2 vs their native lightning DS on the same streaming file, I dropped Roon that day. I was not the only one to come to that conclusion. It’s not because Auralic struggles with Roon. Quite the opposite.
My belief (I don’t have factual data to back up but it is a logical conclusion) is that Roon must operate across many hardware systems (much like MSFT windows) and proprietary OS are able to address cache and buffers directly. Each hardware system is different in this regard. Size, signal path, etc are different in every device. And, similar to windows performance being variable across different hardware systems, Roon must do the same. After all, our streamers are computers that are optimized for the task at hand. Why wouldn’t we expect there to be differences in performance?
For those that believe digital files are merely 1s and 0s, that is true. But the slope of the voltage change that helps a DAC interpret the 1 or 0 is measurably different across sources. And, noise (not hiss) is carried along for the ride. So, after experiencing it directly, I put a fair amount of thought to why and it’s no longer a surprise to me that software can sound different, and hardware too.
Best,
mgrif104