Awesome work once again, thank you! Having you as the resident developer for our DAC is pretty cool and much appreciated.
To restate it, the main and big benefit is to Tidal users without Roon (or other UPnP apps/subscription) to give them stable and direct connection to the R26 without them having to buy and use a Roon (etc) subscription.
Putting aside sound quality for a mo, For Tidal users like you and I who already have Roon and wish to keep it for reasons other than stable, high quality R26 streaming connectivity (eg. Local file playback or its artist info and overall UI) then there is no particular benefit to us, other than another option should we ever wish to ditch Roon in future.
Re sound quality, this varies with the R26 by protocol/app, even where the same streaming service like Tidal is used for each. I actually use the HQplayer NAA as after some experimentation found sounds best out of the various R26 compatible streaming apps and protocols I’ve tried, even when set to no oversampling, let alone using its high quality oversampling filters and modulators with R26 in NOS mode, especially in v5.
Pecking order in my experience is NAA > Roon > JPLAY / Bubble UpnP. As to where Tidal Connect sits on that pecking order, not sure but suspect it has parity with or betters the latter two if not at HQP NAA level. Have a listen and see how it compares to Roon.
) lol
