Sound quality - Roon RAAT vs Roon Air

[David A]

@David A
So, you rather choose not to use 192/24 than to limit the connection to 100 Mbps?
I strongly disagree

With 100 Mbps connection everything works perfectly. You don't even need a switch if there is a way to limit connection on LAN port used for Devialet on router - just as I do on my Asus RT-AC66U.

I think you also are looking at my response, and my original post, in the wrong way.

I have never said I chose not to use 192/24 rather than limit the connection to 100 mbps. What I originally said is "I was one of the lucky ones who never had an issue streaming with RAAT…" and that was because I didn't have any 192/24 source material and that I streamed at native resolution. I could even stream a 176.4/24 resolution album without problems using RAAT and a gigabit connection. I've always preferred streaming at native resolution and leaving all upsampling to my Devialet and I went back to doing that after trying the 192'24 upsampling experiment with Roon. I had no need to choose not to use 192/24 since I had no 192/24 source material on my server and none is available from Tidal which I was using back at that time. I did not choose not to use 192/24, I simply chose to continue streaming everything I had at native resolution over my gigabit connection and I never downsampled anything from 192/24 because I never needed to.

If you want to debate the virtues of upsampling everything to 192/24 before passing it to the Devialet rather than passing all content to it at native resolution then that's a different debate entirely. I tried comparing those options without any problems whatsoever when the only connection option we had was AIR prior to the Expert Pros becoming Roon Ready and I heard no difference so I have always deliberately chosen to stream at native resolution as the simpler option rather than upsampling prior to streaming to my Devialet. RAAT hasn't changed my preferences on that matter.

I also said that a 100 Mbps connection was an effective workaround, it "works perfectly" just as you said. If anyone having problems with source material at any resolution asked me whether I would tell them to downsample that content in preference to using a 100 mbps connection, then I would definitely tell them to use the 100 mbps connection. I don't think the connection speed has any effect on sound quality and downsampling the resolution of the source material would almost certainly have a detrimental effect. If I had any source material at 192/24 back when we first became able to use RAAT I would definitely have moved to a 100 mbps connection much quicker than I did but, as indicated above, I personally had absolutely no need to do so.