I agree with you but perhaps we should define the subject here more precisely because I have a feeling that we are talking about two slightly different things.
People use HQPlayer because it has great upsampling and convolution engines. These will affect to the sound. Also Roon has the upsampling and convolution engines, and these will affect to the sound too. The point here is that the HQPlayer’s upsampling and convolution engines sound better (according to few people here) and people just would like to get this area (=upsampling and convolution engines) improved in Roon, or the integration between Roon and HQPlayer.
As said before, the DSP engine in Roon can always be disabled, and then the Roon definitely shouldn’t have any effect on the sound.
I have no special knowledge about Roon’s intentions regarding either HQP or ROCK, but there are a lot of demands on development time at the moment and I don’t get the impression that big changes to either are a priority. After MQA and completion of the UI changes, maybe that will change, but frankly I doubt it.
ROCK is possible because it is simple. There are any number of things that could be added to it, but adding anything risks creating complexity that makes it impossible to support within Roon’s reasonable capabilities. Besides, everything that anyone wants added to ROCK can be done in your choice of three general purpose operating systems. This is not a situation in which there is no reasonable alternative.
Changes to Roon/HQP require two parties to agree. At the moment my impression is that both are content with the current integration and have other priorities. In particular I’ve raised with Jussi some time ago the possibility of enabling Roon to control distribution of HQP DSP. Jussi noted at the time that he was concerned such an arrangement might reduce SQ and that his NAA design was the recommended network distribution method for HQP. At the time I thought that might mean “maybe”, but I now think that when Jussi refers to potentially reduced SQ he means “No” .
NAA software module is fairly easy to integrate into products as number of already existing products demonstrate… So there’s no point in circulating the audio through multiple layers to work around that. NAA is made to fit particular needs of HQPlayer while offering needed flexibility for extending the functionality. There will be some extensions in not too distant future.
And I don’t know if Roon now supports IPv6 for RAAT and other stuff, but I certainly use primarily IPv6 with my NAAs.
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