When streaming Roon to a stereo pair of homepods from my macbook, there is constant micro dropout/stuttering of audio, rendering the experience unlistenable.
The Roon core is an imac in another room entirely.
I can confirm that setting the Roon core imac’s System Audio output to Airplay Homepods, and then setting the output for Roon on the macbook to System Output completely eliminates the issue. One major downside of this solution, is that the macbook now has no volume control of the homepods.
I do not have this issue streaming from the Apple Music app, where the “core” is the same imac.
This points to an issue as to how Roon implements Airplay.