So… Why is it all purple balls, when its not bit perfect?
Because it is bit-perfect–the file format is lossless and the bits in the file are being transmitted to the speakers without modification.
If Roon were un-folding, you would see a blue light (“Enhanced”) to reflect the DSP.
It would not be accurate to refer to the output of a data-lossy codecs like MQA as bit-perfect. I don’t mean that in a negative way–the MQA encoder is careful to throw away only sonically irrelevant information, but it does lose information in a way that data-lossless codecs like FLAC do not.
Also with MQA, there is not one authoritative “bit-perfect” stream. A software decoder only goes to 2x (96kHz max). The decoder in a DAC will target whatever sample rate the DAC designer + MQA decideded was optimal. Probably something higher in most cases. Again, this isn’t a strictly lossless/bit-perfect process–it’s an optimization task. So “Enhanced” is most appropriate.
At this time, Roon does not unfold MQA. We also can’t receive information from the DAC to know if the DAC is unfolding MQA. So the signal path reflects the information that we do have–that the process of getting bits from file->dac is bit-perfect.