Yes so do I and you ignore that comment
Bu ~90% if people do not have this level of WiFi. Some of us think that everyone has top of the range mesh networks. If you read the posts here it is not the case. I bought Orbi because it would work perfect and I have 6 Sonos zones including 2 stereo pairs that now happily play 24/48 over WiFi.
But I have other RAAT zones that are plugged in for quality purposes and my Core is plugged in via Ethernet.
I just wanted to point out that wifi should not be dismissed right off the bat as not good enough. Also, I think the 90% figure is a little high. If you can afford to pay for Roon, chances are you have enough disposable income to afford a good mesh wifi.
Yes I tried to be even as this is a very contentious issue within these forums.
Roon only want to support Ethernet, but we know we can run both, but many people do not understand what the issue with bad WiFi and how to get good WiFi at reasonable cost.
Apologies if I sounded shouty 
Without you stating more specifically what kind of issues you are having, I dont suppose there is anything useful that people can say really.
For many of us, Roon does seem to work fine over wifi. However, I have to assume that Roon send raw uncompressed (unlike flac etc) data over the internal network and probably 32bit as well both of which will consume more bandwidth.
As for latency tolerance. I have noticed that yanking a cable can leave endpoint playing for a while (several seconds), so I think Roon has no issue with intermittent access so long as it still gets sufficient average bandwidth and seems to buffer far enough ahead in endpoints that latency just does not seem to be an issue as suggested in some posts here.
If you are running grouped zones however, then maybe it is different.
Even 15Mbit connection can in theory just about manage 192K/32bit, but only just. However, it may be worth taking careful note of the specific issues you encounter and if possible what the router thinks the connection rate to the device is (if you router displays such information) and what sample rate and bit depth Roon appears to be sending to the device.
If your Wifi is really bad due to high interference/poor signal strength, then of course it will end up dropping off the network and may not be accesable at all from Roon. That points at the network and not Roon.
If you have alot of devices on your wifi, then for reasons I havnt looked into, that seems to adversely affect the maximum connection rates, perhaps because there is less freedom to aggregate channels into high bandwidth links especially if only using a single router and no mesh and allowing a free for all which is basically what I do (which isnt good for the number of devices I have, but I know this and keep an eye on it).
Instead of using smart connect, maybe switching that off and separating the band/radio if possible can help as often smart connect systems dont seem to either honor a devices preference (2.4Ghz vs 5Ghz), or just ignore it entirely and only bump it onto a faster band on demand, or more likely because in the past it was transferring a lot of data which is annoying when the router hasnt worked that out yet.
For a big house or with connectivity issues consider separate access points or maybe a mesh network.
Some things I have mentioned of course are not possible with many ISP supplied routers and well to be quite honest you get what you pay for and I have often found ISP bundled devices to be awful.
If you want to place higher demands on your wifi, then really you need infrastructure that is up to the job. If the problem is external (to your house - ie industry, neighbours etc), then really wired is your only good option.
It is uncompressed but its at native bitrates / resolution. What leaves the Core in the signal path is what’s arriving at the endpoint if you’re using RAAT. Other formats will resample.
In my experience the buffers used by Roon are significantly shallow compared to other protocols. But this isn’t always the case. It does buffer though and may change the depths / characteristics of this depending on if you use USP or SPDIF. I’m guessing here though.
A glitch in a zone usually causes playback to stop for the group. So, yes, in this case one zone having an issue can cause issues for grouped playback.
It’s primarily because Wifi only allows one device to talk at a time. That statement is simplified to how it actually works. But, if you think of it that way, its easier to understand why lots of devices cause contention for airtime leading to latency and retries. Not terrible for web surfing but terrible for anything you’re trying to do near real time. It’s also why large Wifi deployments are multiple APs hard wired and not “mesh”.
100% I recently went so far as opening my ISP supplied “router” and disconnected all the antennas to keep it’s RF garbage from leaking very far. Silly thing kept turning the radios back on even when I configured them off.
And everyone one after ipeverywhere and Michael seems to ignore that we say it can work and does but we give the real reasons why in many circumstances it doesn’t. Use any true server client system you will enter the same predicament its not a Roon exclusive. Comparing to any system that’s a client only really isn’t comparig Apples to Apples. A network based audio system is only as good as the backbone it’s running on, pure and simple . You dont have to spend the earth or have to use enteprise equipment you just have to plan and understand how it works to make it work the best. This won’t just benefit the hifi but everything else as well. It’s not hard it’s not rocket science it’s just using best practice.
I dont think a large disposable income has a lot to do with it. It is a lack of knowledge on some occasions. I am one of those in this bracket.
Exactly sir!
But hopefully your knowledge base is increasing by the day from the threads you have been involved in of late
I can run at least one Core on a laptop on wifi and it appears to work very well even at 24/192.
However if it crapped out I would not be surprised or annoyed as it is not recommended by Roon.
Does not mean it can’t work in the right circumstances though.
From a low starting point…well yes 
Steve you have had a steep learning curve over the last couple of weeks and you have handled it very well. 
If you can go wired, it’s no-brainer to have everything wired. If you have a good wifi at home, it can work and with work 99.9% of the time, but it is not optimal (just bear that in mind).
About as well as it can be put in two sentences 
My ROCK sits on top of the router.
I have a 3 hub mesh daisy chained, where only the 1st one is hard wired.
I have a 2 x sonos setup over wifi, connected to node 2.
My HiFi end point sits on node 3.
And there are plenty of connected devices too.
It runs beautifully together.
I have had my fair share of issues, but this was always related to the mesh crapping up instead of Roon or any device asking too much.
No solve for you, just a user with a different experience.
Cheers
Just FYI, Roon over WiFi for endpoints runs smoothly. Basic TPLink Mesh solved all issues.
I appreciate all of the replies but I was not really looking for advice on how to get a more stable Wifi, I have done that on another thread. I was just curious as to why Roon was so demanding of Wifi, when say playback from the native Tidal app appears not to be.
The first few posts and links helped me understand this a lot better.
My Roon core is a wired NUC and my main endpoints are wired too. I stream 192/24 PCM and/or DSD128 to them. No problem with any of them, of course.
But I have a couple of endpoints only reachable with a Wi-Fi link: A Digi+ optical transport and an Allo Piano DAC. I can play 192/24 on both endpoints with no problem at all. Of course, Wi-Fi depends on its environment and mine is working for me. By the way, the Piano DAC is in a building 500 metres away from my home with a point to point Wi-Fi link.
The point is that Wi-Fi itself can handle the trafic load even in the case of HD streams, but it depends on the environment that you can not control. So I can stream 192/24 without cuts and another person can have problems with 44/16.
The 802.11 MAC contention protocol is the key, @ipeverywhere has told it yet.
Like others had said, a mesh network with one or more nodes (depending on the size and distribution of your home) could be the solution for you. I use an eero main unit with two nodes and they work flawlessly from day one. High resolution music streaming is not an issue. I have the eero main connected to an Asus router and configured to handle wi-fi only while the router handles the rest.
There are many options from TP-Link, Asus, eero, Google, etc.
The TP-Link Deco S4 is highly regarded and at around $130 is hard to beat.
Wi-Fi’s MAC protocol is not very efficient. If you add mesh networking the throughput will decrease, for sure.
If the mesh increases signal strength and thus reduces interference and packet loss, it will increase throughput.