Options to improve digital sound

Mac fanboy, have all their products. However, for music, I do not use any Mac gear, except my iPhone to control my streamer. 

Going to suggest, removing the Mini, replacing it with a quality streamer. Don't change anything else yet. Just get used to the streamer, then go down the upgrade path. 

I had my old ipod (yup, still got one) plugged into my system for a while. It sounded flat, hollow, and compressed. 

Roon Core is where vast majority of processing goes on, the relatively complex interface of Roon is processor intensive. CPU's working at relatively high rates creates more noise and higher latency, both are enemies of resolution  Higher latency also means greater chance for timing issues. The reason so many find Roon inferior to the proprietary music players is those music players have been designed as to require far less processing and deliver lower latency, result is both increased resolution and more analog like sound quality. 

First going to start by saying everything you know and love about analog signal transfer, do not transfer to digital. a packet is so different over a analog signal, they share almost nothing.

@sns  Going to buck this trend. Streaming is NOT CPU intensive, it's all network speed, and computer IOPS. Roon may be CPU intensive, when indexing, sorting playlist, getting artwork, etc, but all those task are RAM and disk intensive. 

Latency is only in networks, not in the computer. What happens inside the computer is cacheing, and processes start to get stalled waiting for CPU time. Nothing inside the Roon should make it run completely run out of resources. 

What is happening on the app on your tablet is not the same as what is happening inside the Roon core, or your streamer. The streamer doesn't care about anything but getting the stream, it doesn't concern it's self with anything else. 

CPU's do not create noise, noise on the processing side are not thing. What does create noise are spinning disk, fans, and power supplies. A CPU will not introduce noise when running at 100% anymore then when running 25%. That is simply not a thing.

Unless something is wrong with the end to end system if your stream is 16/44, it will be 16/44 at the DAC. Nothing in the chain will drop the 16/44 bit rate unless there are issues. It takes around 5mb of bandwidth for 16/44. When you do have issues, the streams does not degrade, the song just stops playing. 

For everyone, who is so worried about getting the cleanest stream to the DAC, if you have the rented modem it is the biggest pile of poo in your entire chain. If it's Xfinity, you are also sharing it will everyone in WiFi range. 

For networks, you want AS FEW HOPS as you can get. You also want AS FEW conversions along the way. Adding several switches, and swapping from coax, e-net, fiber, and so on is not a good thing. All have their places and uses. Get a good commercial switch, set it up properly and you should be good. If you are so worried about it, do some QoS, port mapping, network segmantation....

 

So, Roon not cpu intensive. Many monitor their cpu utilization in real time and report relatively high utilization with Roon vs other music players. Also I directly monitor cpu usage via Euphony OS, I can do this by direct connection to streamer or via tablet. I'm monitoring both temps and utilization in real time.

As for digital packets not impacting analog signal, laughable. Streamers don't affect latency, nonsense.@sns 

Taking what I said out of context. Never said Roon was not, said streaming is not. What ever Roon is doing is in addition to the music stream. Chances are they are separate processes/streams. 

Also never said, packets will not affect the analog signal. What I said was Analog and digital are very different, same rules do not apply. If you streamer is in fact introducing network latency, then your streamer needs to be replaced, or upgraded. A streamer should never have network latency.  If I can stream 4k video with Dobly Atmos, you should be able to stream Hi-rez audio. Something else is going on if you are having latency issues. 

@shalommorgan Whether CPU processing noise is relevant, I don’t know. I feel electric noise emitted by a single poorly designed network device or a summation of network devices is the main issue. I don’t think, in general, having fewer network devices is better or best. Logically to me, simply decoupling and/ or reducing electrical network noise is paramount. So whatever it takes to achieve lower noise needs to be done. Of course starting with a device that is designed to limit unwanted noise is key. I respectfully disagree with @mswale that the use of fiber optic is not good, generally speaking. Used wisely, fiber optic connections can be an effective tool at separating/ isolating noisy devices from the DAC. (this topic has been discussed over and over on AG). Sorry to bringing it up again. 

Again, digital domain is vastly different over analog signals. CPU's will not put any noise in the digital packet. Digital packets do not have a concept of noise. Never in my 30+ IT career has any network or computer issue been related to noise. Even in factories where computers are controling manufacturing robots.

Not sure where "decoupling" networks came from. Outside of Audio, this is not a thing. Never said fiber is not good, in fact it is the "best" network transfer method. Would guess around 80% of networks are fiber. Fiber is also the most expensive! If you have any run over 100ft fiber will work better. If you can end to fiber, I would. But when a normal fiber cable with out SFP's are $300, then another $300 for each end SFP it gets expensive quickly.  Air-gaped networks are a thing, but is all about security, and isolation. 

Maybe someone needs to do some packet captures, read the packets, also put an oscilloscope on the cables to see if there is any "noise" on the cable. Not saying it's not there, that it's not a packet transfer issue. If this was a thing, research labs, hospitals, manufacture, would all try to fix that issue.   

 What commercial switch do you recommend

Also, processors might not produce physical noise but they emit EMI. The heat from a processor inside the enclosure as well as the emitted EMI impacts other components an in turn adds noise to the output digital signal. Yes for data transfer it doesn’t matter. But it does impact streaming music. 
I just can’t figure out how it could if there is no physical connection between my roon core and my dac. It’s all done using mesh network. 

Cisco, Brodcom, Brocade, Ubiquiti, HP, but if you don't know how to configure them, they are useless. A "good" 8 port switch will start around $800. 

Everything that has current flowing through it will have EMI, it's a byproduct. CPU's use such low voltages, that it will not have an effect on things around it. What can make a difference are the computers fans kicking in, they produce a ton of noise, both physical and electrical.  But not sure this is affect processing, or affect anything the CPU is processing. 

You are not outputting a digital signal, you are outputting digital packets. The packets contain the data for the DAC to produce a audio signal. The DAC is in fact a computer. 

Home mesh networks are crap. Really wish they would not sell them. Almost all would be better off with a repeater in a couple spots over cheap mesh. To do mesh properly you need really good equipment with a base-station that has all the algorithm to handle hand-off, priority, and switching. Talk about noise, if you use a WiFi signal meter around the lower end stuff, it's just not good. 

On WiFi everyone wants isolation, well, if you are using WiFi, you are isolating your device. Direct connecting is almost always best.

@erik_squires think he is nailing it.

@signaforce 

That isn't what I said at all. Cheap mesh is crap. If you look at the FCC tag, then look up the radio spec, most of them are under .1w of power, the CPU parts are inferior, do not handle handoff, or more then a couple devices at once. They get bogged down. Usually the radio signal is not clean, introduces jitter. 

In that instance, you are better off with another basestation, there are a ton of basestations that will "extend" your WiFi, making basically a mesh.