Roon - the next step?

[cereal killer]

Guys help me out, am I getting crazy or what?!

For the sake of staying with Roon I was ready to trade my beautifully sounding Aurender to a Roon Nucleus or Innuos Zenith. I was this close, but then last night I noticed that my Aurender appears as a Roon end point, albeit on Airplay. so I gave it a try and to my biggest surprise it sounded better than Roon on Air/Wifi! I was always under the impression that Airplay is an average wireless audio transmission protocol with bandwidth limitation and accordingly has a negative impact on signal path and hence sound quality. in Roon, signal path from the core all the way to my D400 through Aurender/Airplay appears with a green dot indicating "High Quality" and not a the purple dot that indicates an all "Lossless" path with Roon on Air/Wifi

I realize that I need to do some more rigorous testing but the initial finding took me by surprise. Has any of you tried Roon over Airplay? And what was the experience like?

Another recent advent as well makes me wanna stick with my Aurender is the release of an MQA decoding software. Now the Aurender X100 can unfold MQA files and send them as HiRes PCM with sampling rates of 88.2 or 96Khz and bit depth of 24 or 32 to my D400. With the ever growing MQA library on Tidal this can't get any better and the initial feel of the sound quality is impressive on the direct USB audio connection.

Hi - Since reading your findings i experimented with Devialet AIR v Apple Airplay. I have managed to replicate the functionality of your Aurender X100 with my 2TB SSD QNAP TS251+ NAS which has also indicated the green dot verse the purple dot. The differences for me have been extremely subtle at best, but them again the systems fully hardwired via CAT7.... I've never used WiFi with my Expert 220 Pro CI.

The green dot says 'high quality' which to me does not necessarily represent a bit perfect lossless audio.
The purple dot says 'lossless' which to me means this is a bit perfect audio path.

I'm not convinced Apple Airplay is better than AIR, the main difference for me was the output level. To test this i enabled both Inputs in roon as different endpoints/rooms and set the volumes as close as possible to each other then flicked between. They sounded Identical to me.... but i found Airplay had somehow limited the volume/output which obviously reduces headroom and dynamics. For me Devialet AIR is the winner, but maybe the ethernet connection is producing a fundamental difference?

Can i ask why are you using WiFi instead of Ethernet?