I hope you prefer it for the reduced latency alone. I’d be surprised if there were other reasons, coming from someone who I’m sure knows networking well enough to understand there’s some serious buffering going on at the TCP level, which allows it to expose a stream abstraction on top of a packetized protocol such as IP (in which packets can get dropped, delayed and arrive in the wrong order). If anything, I would expect a larger audio buffer to have smaller overhead and require less work.
There are a lot of people around the world that believe that their proposition is a ‘special case’ and this argument surrounding burden of proof does not apply.
If you want the experts to look into your claims, put your findings in a paper called “The Influence of Buffer Size on Sound Quality in a Bit-Perfect Network Player” and submit it to AES for review. (It could still take a while, as the experts may still be busy with figuring out the directionality of fuses.)
I would let Roon stream “lossless” remotely, and invest on the end-point, let the end-point (streamer/DAC) do the job which it is supposed to do, i.e. DSP, optimizing upsampling if needed.
Late to this conversation. The biggest determinant of sound quality in a room are the speakers chosen and the room itself. I think everyone would agree with this statement.
I use a Roon bridge running on an RPi4 just because my music sits on a Mac Mini M4 server that is 20 feet away from the receiver that drives my speakers. Rather than plug my DAC into the Mac Mini and running a 20 foot RCA cable it is far easier to use a Roon bridge and send the data over my wired network. TCP never loses packets so the data sent from the Mac Mini to the bridge is bit for bit perfect. Any well engineered DAC made in the last 10 years will produce excellent sound.
Even in I had my DAC plugged directly into my Mac Mini (and forgoing a bridge) I do not think I would hear any difference in sound quality Conclusion - get better speakers, best investment you can make
Past that you can use something like REW to analyze your room and if necessary make adjustments (via room treatments or equalization via software)