Roon Core is where vast majority of processing goes on, the relatively complex interface of Roon is processor intensive. CPU's working at relatively high rates creates more noise and higher latency, both are enemies of resolution Higher latency also means greater chance for timing issues. The reason so many find Roon inferior to the proprietary music players is those music players have been designed as to require far less processing and deliver lower latency, result is both increased resolution and more analog like sound quality.
First going to start by saying everything you know and love about analog signal transfer, do not transfer to digital. a packet is so different over a analog signal, they share almost nothing.
@sns Going to buck this trend. Streaming is NOT CPU intensive, it's all network speed, and computer IOPS. Roon may be CPU intensive, when indexing, sorting playlist, getting artwork, etc, but all those task are RAM and disk intensive.
Latency is only in networks, not in the computer. What happens inside the computer is cacheing, and processes start to get stalled waiting for CPU time. Nothing inside the Roon should make it run completely run out of resources.
What is happening on the app on your tablet is not the same as what is happening inside the Roon core, or your streamer. The streamer doesn't care about anything but getting the stream, it doesn't concern it's self with anything else.
CPU's do not create noise, noise on the processing side are not thing. What does create noise are spinning disk, fans, and power supplies. A CPU will not introduce noise when running at 100% anymore then when running 25%. That is simply not a thing.
Unless something is wrong with the end to end system if your stream is 16/44, it will be 16/44 at the DAC. Nothing in the chain will drop the 16/44 bit rate unless there are issues. It takes around 5mb of bandwidth for 16/44. When you do have issues, the streams does not degrade, the song just stops playing.
For everyone, who is so worried about getting the cleanest stream to the DAC, if you have the rented modem it is the biggest pile of poo in your entire chain. If it's Xfinity, you are also sharing it will everyone in WiFi range.
For networks, you want AS FEW HOPS as you can get. You also want AS FEW conversions along the way. Adding several switches, and swapping from coax, e-net, fiber, and so on is not a good thing. All have their places and uses. Get a good commercial switch, set it up properly and you should be good. If you are so worried about it, do some QoS, port mapping, network segmantation....