I had the same experience with both the NS1 and the Optical Rendu in my system, to the point I wouldn’t claim there was a difference, and I know the versions I was comparing were bit for bit identical.
Doesn’t mean that on a different system or with a different streamer, the results wouldn’t be different.
I agree. I also think that Roon is clearly problematic for some people and there are a lot of folks that say the same thing about the propriatary players sounding better. Whether the Innuous send or as Orr says his Aurender player.
I actually should try the Lumin player and see since it’s their new revised platform. I just don’t want to give up the convinience of Roon and now that my wife is using the Roon client on her iPhone, I’m pretty much stuck. lol
On the U1 mini i bought from you many moons ago the local playback was noticably and immediately better than the Qobuz streaming. I listened to Ozzy’s Zombie Stomp streamed and it felt more “staticy”, less settled than the local file. The local flac was much more calm, in place, and in line. To me it is like using the sharpness setting in a monitor too much and it looks off, like many lines slightly off set vs in place to make the line look solid.
Still not out, still being promised soon.
I did that test too, and actually wrote an application to serve via upnp and squeeze so I new exactly what was going on.
Honestly if there was a difference it was small, about the only interesting observation was that the streamers I tried consumed the entire track from the network connection in under 10 seconds and just played it from memory. That was true of both UPnP and Squeeze.
It’s not very surprising since both protocols serve audio the same basic way.
RAAT doesn’t appear to do that, I see network activity periodically throughout playback, and I guess that might be the difference, if it is the impact is going to vary by streamer and it’s software.
I also tried decompressing the FLAC file on the server vs on the streamer, that didn’t make a significant difference either.