I cannot give objective proof or measurements as to why memory playback sounds better.
But it does, in my experience. I own an Innuos Zenith SE player. I use it as a music player from its USB output. It supports both Roon Core as well as an internal LMS server. When using the latter, the internal player used is an Innuos-modified version of squeezelite. This combo is controlled by the iPeng app on iOS,
Now let me be clear. I far prefer the Roon experience, and this is what I mostly use. However, despite the rather grim usability of the iPeng/squeezelite/LMS combo, the latter sounds remarkably better.
Innuous have indicated that their mods to squeezelite are the reason for the better SQ, and the primary mod is that they allocate a large in-memory buffer to preload the track. Without looking at the code, I don’t know exactly what their algorithm is.
My point is that this approach merits further study by Roon. Discarding it out of hand really annoys customers like me. If you guys (Roon) want volunteers to beta test it, I volunteer.
There are also recent experiments on CA that indicate that endpoints running RoonBridge that use audiolinux (with “ramroot” mode) to run the entire OS instance in RAM experience a massive SQ improvement.
It appears that there is much to be learned with in-memory music, OS, and applications. I do understand that Roon is a much more sophisticated ecosystem. But I’d like to have the option to explore these optimizations.
That’s all I’m asking.