Every audiophile playback platform has one job — to hand your DAC the file that came out of the studio and stay out of the way.
Oops. Almost none of them do that.
Roon, JRiver, Audirvana, and the rest of the popular audiophile platforms work by making your computer the player. When you hit play, the server opens your music file, decodes it into raw audio samples, and streams its own output across the network to your DAC or streamer, continuously, for the length of the song. Your equipment never sees the original file. It receives the computer's performance of it. That performance is only ever as good as its buffer strategy.
There's a reason people spend so much money on "audiophile" computers to run these platforms — the computer's job matters, because the computer is playing your music.
The newer Connect services from Qobuz and Tidal fixed half of that problem. The streamer pulls the file directly from the cloud instead of from a computer on your network. But they quietly introduced another one: your streamer now has to hold an encrypted TLS session with the cloud service and decrypt every frame of music in real time, which, on the small processors in streamers can be both taxing and noisy. Either way — server-side player or Connect service — something is working hard right next to your music.
Maestro is the only platform I know of that solves both. When you press play, Maestro hands your streamer the unencrypted file using Maestro's advanced LAN relay and steps out of the way. Your equipment sees untouched bytes, identical to the original, with your endpoint's processor loafing instead of laboring.
Why bring this up? Simple. So many of you have asked why Maestro and Qobuz Connect don't sound the same when, ostensibly, they are both getting out of the way of the computer.
Great question and one I couldn't answer up until now.
Thanks for asking.
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