Following Audirvãna’s announcement of their partnership with dCS I noticed they just announced a similar relationship with darTZeel.
They certainly seem to be on a mission, emulating Roon in building out a hardware ecosystem at the high end.
Interesting but aside from Audirvana associating themselves with some very high end end gear for marketing purposes, what does it really mean?
It may be over-optimistic to infer any meaning into a release like this. However based on what we know of the dCS relationship it presumably means pre-tested, known to work, and possibly pre-configured settings in Audirvāna for the LHC-208. Nice but not exactly earth shattering. Since Audirvāna supports UPnP (unlike Roon), and isn’t trying to force its own proprietary protocol on the world the amount of work behind this should at least be pretty minimal.
I doubt the market share darTZeel commands would represent more than a rounding error in Audirvāna’s base so there may be some hope of an aspirational halo effect, but I would imagine even that is pretty limited.
One of the reasons I continue with Mosaic instead of Roon is the “acknowledged or perceived” change in audio quality. Last I looked half felt Roon changed the sound while the other half found it to be the same.
I sometimes use JPlay as it is simply a control point which has no effect on the sound quality.
At the time of my JPlay experimentation I briefly tried Audirvana. Reading their website it appears the program does have influence over the sound. That is why I stopped my experimentation with it.
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I’d agree. Technically, it’s not a bad initiative from Audirvana; bridging that gap that UPnP doesn’t natively support interrogation of the Renderer for capabilities.
The JPlay folks are full of hyperbolic B.S though. Suggesting that their Control-Point App reduces the amount of network traffic which in turn improves sound quality - B.S on multiple fronts 
I agree with you wholeheartedly on their ridiculous claims about network traffic.
I look at their program as a Roon knockoff (from a UI and interface perspective) which is strictly a control point and (hopefully) just sends commands to the streaming services rather than additionally implementing something like RAAT.
Prior to becoming a dCS user I was a long time Linn streaming user. It is funny to see even amongst Linn owners a 50/50 split on whether Roon changes and influences sound quality.
I would be interested to read/learn/hear a technical explanation of how a music server serving bits to a DAC buffer can change the output analog signal.
If we agree that the input file is identical, what properties could Roon/Aurender/Taiko/Mosaic attach to it, that would both enter and exit the DAC buffer, to change to output analog signal?
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Not a huge surprise really, given that in the face of clear objective evidence and with all else being equal, many will continue to believe their subjective hearing impressions (or be swayed by what they read online).
There’s plenty of pseudo-scientific explanations around, just read anything from Taiko Audio or any of the Audiophile Ethernet Switch vendors 
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I expect that ultimately virtually all believe their subjective hearang impressions. Otherwise why listen?
I have had too similar kind of questions and here is what I have settled to for now. It is not the any corruption of bit that cause the effect but the additional noise that these supporting equipment like ethernet switches, routers, computers and the noises generated by crystals inside them can bring in different kinds of artifacts/noises to the chain that affect final analog output.
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If we agree that this could be the case, which seems logical and possible, then the solution is a custom optical cable, similar to MSB’s ProUSB, which eliminates such possibility from the server, and to abandon Ethernet
This could feed either Rossini or the Vivaldi Upsampler.
Then, further isolate the Vivaldi DAC with a proprietary, short run optical cable from the Upsampler
Just my two cents…
I would prefer Roon does something as basic and simple as (what I hope) JPlay currently does.
Simply send commands to the online streaming services to select a track to play. Nothing more
Well, liking their subjective hearing impression is different from believing some technical myth and allowing it to influence their hearing.
To the point made earlier in this thread, JPlay for example claims their Control-point client affects the sound quality; a patently absurd notion. But some people actually believe it, leading to perceptual bias where JPlay sounds better when in fact there’s no difference.
In the case of Roon vs. Audirvana vs. Mosaic it’s slightly more complicated because the Servers and the network transport protocol stacks involved are slightly different (edit: and the software has the potential to digital-signal-process the stream if so configured). So, it’s far easier for people to believe there must be a sonic difference, and be appropriately biased. That’s analogous to believing how you download a file from the Internet affects its content; Chrome/QUIC vs. Safari/TCP vs. FTP.
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Then it is not a case of believing what you hear but hearing what you believe. 
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Sharp as a tack Pete. You summed up in one line what took me paragraphs 
I have no skin in the ethernet audiophile switch business. I don’t own any nor do I plan to.
But whether one “believes what one hears” or “hears what one believes” doesn’t really matter does it?
If one actually hears a difference, isn’t that ALL that matters (to that individual) no matter what the source of that difference in hearing or belief underpinning that difference?
And if they choose to tell others that they do hear a difference (without attempting to make $s off of that or proposing / “creating” science to explain it), I see no issues.
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Everyone is entitled to have their preference or belief based on their subjective impressions (biased or otherwise).
I don’t see any issue with calling out those who ascribe some pseudo-scientific explanation for their preference though, especially if it’s based on some for-profit vendor’s B.S claims. Isn’t that what forums are for? 
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Hmmm, I don’t think that - generically - the reason forums exist is to “call people out”, but other than that we’re saying the same thing so I’ll stop here. (I better, before Pete points out that we’re no longer on topic!)
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Good point, “calling out” is probably the wrong phrase… but you get what I mean
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