So many bunch of “Idiots” on this forum…
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Once again PMG reveals his ignorance on how networking actually works. He claim that Maestro sounds better because it offloads heavy processing from the native streamer.
In reality though, there’s virtually no actual impact on the streaming board from the decrypting and maintaining HTTPS sessions to the CDN because decryption is asymmetric in nature and designed to be super lightweight at the receiving endpoints. This is easily proved by looking at CPU/Memory loading of any Raspberry Pi when receiving music streams for example.
Conversely, the impact on the local network of having Maestro first receive streams and then repackage it to send out yet another stream to the Streamer/DAC could be argued is be much more detrimental to sound quality..
Bottom line, PMG is posting garbage as usual, and his fan boys just lap it up 
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For the courageous ones, a thread about Maestro on Roon’s community forum:
What is interesting here, is how at the bottom of the thread the McGowan addicts are defeated by Roon users and the forum moderators, using exact same technics and claims as Paul’s adepts to say Roon sounds way better and to despise PS Audio solution. The adepts are just revolted, even more when they’re demonstrated the exact same arguments used to promote Marstro have just been used to defend Roon!
Both rather funny!…
…both very sad in the end…
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This technical discussion is above my pay grade, however isn’t the fact that a $35 Raspberry Pi can be used as a receiving endpoint demonstrate how lightweight the compute requirement already is? In other words what heavy processing is he referring to if a lowly Pi can already handle it 
Precisely. In fact, the Streaming boards from the likes of StreamUnlimited and ConversDigital, along with the Raspberry Pi Compute modules are absolutely brilliant machines that do their job exactly as advertised and cleanly, so they’re easy to isolate from sensitive analog components.
There’s absolutely no benefit to PS Audio’s Maestro, PMG’s claims are completely bogus. Not surprising given his penchant for hyperbole.
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My small contribution to this thread:
Also problematic is that Paul seems to have no appreciation for the resources needed to maintain a software platform like this, at scale, with 99+% uptime, over time. Unless one believes that Paul is much more capable than Roon’s engineers, the Maestro effort will eventually need (almost) all of the same resources as Roon to compete. That is millions of dollars per year and, according to Roon’s LinkedIn page, ~30 employees, which is basically the size of PS Audio.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), “projects” like these, often just use up a company’s resources and eventually get shut down.
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Spot on. We’re seeing this play out in Maestro; bugs that were fixed in one version reemerge in later versions… things that were working and stable suddenly break, etc. Typical symptoms of unstructured haphazard software hack, rather than proper software development.
Citing myself
BTW: any news from pdave?