What does the “use flac compression” setting under the device setup setting do? What does this setting do when off and when om?
Rather than convert all file types to WAV before sending to the endpoint, it sends files which are stored as FLAC directly to Squeezeboxes as they can process FLAC natively.
Quite useful as it saves a bit of network bandwidth and also reduces processing overhead on the Core.
This is relevant to Squeezebox devices only; for most other devices Roon core does the decoding and sends PCM or DSD.
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So if we are using a Squeezebox endpoint (like Innuos experimental SqueezeLite feature), we leave the box checked / on?
I’m not sure it would work for Squeezebox software emulators. The whole point of it is that the Squeezebox hardware has FLAC decoding capabilities on device.
Possibly … only one way to find out. But why would you do that if they Innuos supports Roon natively?
Also, from the KB …
Squeezelite/Software endpoints
Roon does not support software implementations of squeezebox endpoints, and we do not test with them as part of our QA process. If you attempt to do this, you are on your own.
To take advantage of the ZENith internal memory player.
See new firmware release notes below, top and bottom paragraphs. People at CA forums discovered it sounds better than regular Roon Endpoint playback, and I agree (based on the last few hours I tried this)
I still don’t understand this…
What does this setting do when?
1 - Is on,
2 - Is off
What setting?
If you mean the FLAC switch it’s this.
So, if it’s “on”, it will do what you described?
Is it better to be on? In my case, the Roon Core (ZENith MK3) is also the SqueezeLite Roon Endpoint
No you don’t need it. It’s only to save on bandwidth as the old.squeezeboxes where slow wireless connections. Just let Roon send pcm
This is wrong.
Squeezeboxes will happily accept WAV or PCM.
Sean Adams, the main Squeezebox designer, was enlightened enough to realise that it’s just plain inefficient to send PCM to endpoints and given that LMS (Squeezebox Server) was able to run on very, very low end hardware (such as he Pi) he gave his devices native support for decompressing FLAC.
Did I say they don’t accept wav or pcm? No I don’t think so.
You said it was to do with slow wireless connections. It isn’t.
To provide additional evidence for that argument, I pointed out you can stream PCM to a squeezebox, which would be a bit pointless if they had “slow wireless connections”. Geddit?
My radio barfs with Wav I have set to Flac works better as it’s wireless is tosh.
That’s your local wireless conditions. The 802.11a/b standard that even earlier Squeezeboxes than the Radio used, have enough bandwidth to support WAV/PCM.
Another benefit of having native FLAC support though was that you could have a very large number of multi-room streaming endpoints on the go because enpoints were doing the heavy lifting, and the network optimisation of FLAC > WAV/PCM
Maybe, but it’s only 2m from the AP, but it still saves on bandwidth 
and in Thynames useage is not required at all as either way the InnuOS will be doing the transcode to PCM but I doubt does any harm if left on.
It sounds like I should turn it off? Better SQ? Honestly I don’t hear any difference, on or off. And I have a pretty revealing system. But for the sake of “doing it by the book”?