How good is Roon AIR?

[ogs]

A new thread seems sensible for this one. I've used Roon's AIR implemetation since it was first released with build 243 of Roon. I am one of the lucky that have had no problems; no crakling, no white noise, no drop in sound. The first time I connected it to the ethernet port I got the "Transport: Device in Use" message, but this was resolved with reboots and I have not seen it since. I had my amp on wifi for remote control, but this did not work for Audio, so I reconfigured for ethernet cable. I had given up Devialet's AIR a long time ago as I got white noise within seconds no matter what I tried.

My normal setup is a microRendu connected to a Mutec MC-3+USB with AES/EBU to the amp. I've used this setup since my amp returned from France after upgrade to Pro in January, only interrupted by the amp upgrade to 10.1.0 and mR to v2.5.
I started with the same Roon configuration for RoonAIR as I've used with mR/Mutec. I immediately heard that RoonAIR sounded very good. Open and relaxed. Going back to mR/Mutec was better. More deep bass, better detail in the mid bass, more dynamic sound overall. But the midrange of AIR is quite exeptional and on par with the mR/Mutec combo even if is sounds a little different.
This comparison is obviously unfair to RoonAIR so I started to optimise a few tings. In my system mR/Mutec souds good when upsampling is done in Roon's DSP. I have "Power of 2" enabled which means that I send either 176.4 or 192 kHz to the mR. With RoonAIR I get better sound when the amplifier does upsampling so I send native samplerates. I also used a little parametric EQ in the deep bass to even out the amplitude difference to mR/Mutec.
With this optimisation AIR sounded even better. Midrange transparency is still there and now the bass range improved considerably in character and detail. This sounds extremely good! Very coherent with good dimensionality. Going back to the mR/Mutec combo I still get better and cleaner dynamics, but AIR is now quite close! I believe AIR is fully equal to a microRendu direct to the USB port, maybe better... Note: I have not tried this so it's an assumption.

What I'd like to try is isolating the ethernet input of the Devialet with a pair of FMCs. Others report good results with this on their ethrnet-enabled dacs so I assume this will work well directly to the Devialet as well. The Mutec seems to have less noise (lower noise floor) than AIR. If there is noise added on the ethernet input, FMCs should help with isolation. I won't do this until after the Core Infinity is mounted in my amp as I expect the new ethernet port to be 1000Base-T i.e. Gigabit. The new streamer board may be RAAT enabled or, accroding to the newest info we got thanks to Antoine, even Dante/AES67/Ravenna! Then a completely new comparison is needed.

This is how far I got before I shipped my microRendu off for update to 1.4 hardware. I've also ordered the UpTone USPCB to go between the mR and Mutec. We'll see how that goes   
In the mean time I am perfectly happy using Roon Air. I get direct feedback from the amp (volume dB, phase, tone controls) in Roon remote. For those who can not see the amps display this will be a major feature of Roon AIR.