Roon streaming wireless or wired and why?

[David A]

Wireless has the advantage of galvanic isolation, you don't have a cable carrying current between your source and you're amp. The problem with wifi is that while it isn't totally line of sight, radio waves can pass through walls and objects, they often get reduced in strength when they do pass through something so it can be difficult in some situations for the amp to pick up a strong enough wifi signal to maintain a stable connection. In addition there's a lot of wifi signals in the air using the frequencies you're using, pretty well everyone is using wifi for something, and that may cause problems.

I had problems with wifi in my setup. I was streaming from my Mac in another room so there were several walls in the way and this was before my Devialet got the CI board upgrade so it didn't have the external antenna. Wifi would work for a few minutes and then stop working, I couldn't get reliable signal strength. I had to put a satellite wifi unit next to the amp and connect that to the amp by ethernet and everything worked perfectly. Eventually I had a permanent wired connection installed from a wall point near my computer to a wall point near my amp. Ethernet just works with no problems about wifi reception or signal strength. It also gives you the chance to play all sorts of games comparing different ethernet cables, you can't do that with wifi :-) (I realise some people may actually regard that fact as a plus for wifi.)

Do they sound different? I don't know, I never used wifi for long enough to really get a handle on the sound of that connection. I'd suspect that if you have a good quality wifi connection any difference in sound quality to ethernet would be small. If I could get a reliable wifi connection I don't know whether I would have bothered getting a permanent ethernet connection installed but I had problems with wifi and being able to go have a wired connection all the way from my amp to my router delivered a totally reliable connection for me and, since I own my own home, I had no problems getting the wiring installed. It might be a different matter if I was in rented accommodation.

If your wifi connection is working without problems, I'd say sit back and enjoy it and don't bother with ethernet. If you're having wifi reception/signal strength problems, then a wired connection is the best way out of your problems.

One other point. Since you're using Roon and RAAT, there's currently a bug in the Devialet firmware which results in problems if you're using RAAT with a gigabit speed ethernet connection. You avoid that problem with wifi. If you swap to ethernet you may have to deal with it. Different people seem to have the problem to differing degrees but it's worse if you're streaming high res files. I would get the problem badly if I had Roon upscale everything to 24/192 but I I streamed ithe original resolution I never noticed the problem. The fixes for it at present if you're using ethernet and Roon are to either reduce the transmission speed to your Devialet to 100T instead of gigabit or swap to using Roon's version of Devialet AIR instead of RAAT. This bug has been present since our Devialet's became Roon Ready in February last year but there have been reports that Devialet are currently testing a firmware update that fixes the problem. There's been no word of when we're likely to see it. I use RAAT but I've got a 100T ethernet connection to my 140 Pro and haven't had any problems with that speed ethernet connection.