@brian What are your thought about improving sound?
I’m going to start with some background, and my philosophy on this stuff, then get to your point.
In terms of EM/RF noise, computers are noisy things, and in general, not a great thing to have near audio devices. From our perspective, the first class solution will always be to create some separation between the media server and the endpoint. USB is not a great choice for this. Ethernet is much better.
I have a nice DAC here that I use as a headphone amp and sits on my desk ~3ft away from 2 computers. Not going to name names, but it’s in the $1-2k range, and it’s very highly regarded at that price point. It’s plugged into computer A. If I play silence to the DAC from computer A, and scroll my web browser up and down on computer B, I can hear it in my headphones. They aren’t even directly connected.
This is what computer audiophiles are battling and, frankly, no matter what Roon does on computer A, it’s not going to stop that sort of interference from having an effect on SQ.
Computers are also complex, and don’t always emit a constant amount of EM/RF noise. So the idea behind a lot of what Audirvana does is: the more subsystems of the computer that can be disabled, moderated, or avoided, the less potential noise will be emitted. So it helps you turn off spotlight indexing (sysoptimizer), preload tracks into memory so we can stop dealing with the disk/ssd (at least most of the time, when pre-loading isn’t happening), and so forth.
This seems sound to me, and there’s no reason why Roon can’t provide some similar functionality in the future. It’s a nice thing to do, and not a huge effort, and it will make things better for people who drive their playback from a computer.
We come from a background in networked media servers, and we began actively moving away from playing audio from computers in the Sooloos hardware in 2009, because there were huge SQ benefits to be had by moving that way. We needed the benefits of a heavyweight media server, but we also needed the benefits of a lightweight audio renderer. The most elegant and complete solution is to put some separation in between them.
As for memory play specifically. I can see how it might help, since once you’ve pre-loaded, there’s less work going on in the computer (CPU can scale back down if there was DSP being pre-cached, and disk activity reduces significantly).
As an engineer, this feels like an unsatisfying solution. We can impact the noisiness of our computers by tiptoeing around their limitations and applying band-aids like sysoptimizer or memory play, or by hunting for system services to turn off. In the end, even with everything done “right”, there’s still a giant noisy motherboard, cpu, power supply, and gigabytes of RAM sitting there doing something. Almost no matter what, that is going to be noisier than a well-engineered embedded system built by people who understand and care deeply about sound quality.
This is where we are going with RoonSpeakers and why we are working with manufacturers to make networked endpoints a viable option for as many people as possible. This is where we see high-quality computer audio going–server on the computer, and endpoints driven over ethernet. It’s better for SQ, and takes pressure off of server software to be lightweight to the point where browsing functionality and metadata capabilities are sacrificed (a la Audirvana).