It’s important to note that this is not default behavior when streaming outside of your home network - Plex wants to transcode everything to save you network data, and you have to click a few checkboxes to make that stop. The music part of this setup can stream and play your files with no re-encoding or resampling. (I have run it this way, and it works fine.) Basically, this goes beyond the capability of Roon in that you can stream any of your movies, music, or live TV to anywhere you have an internet connection. You don’t need a custom setup like this though, as you could run this off a Nvidia Shield TV and an external USB drive. I have a 12TB qnap nas hosting the files, and a directly networked Linux mint SFF PC running as the server. Having your own server and a full subscription really lets this platform shine. ( - ignore this post, as you said you don’t have home networking needs.) I know this isn’t on topic, but I feel it gets overlooked and is very good. I’m literally walking into Mile High stadium right now, so I’ll finish my thoughts up later. J River and Roon definitely sounded the best of the 5. Not bad sounding, but they had usability issues and sometimes would hang or have network streaming issues.

Second worse was a tie between Plex and Audirvana. It might be free, but the effort required to configure it and get it to sound as good as possible… Let’s just say that the squeeze wasn’t worth the juice. I even got help from others who used it as a daily driver when trying to figure it all out.

The sound issues were readily apparent by comparison.

Even taking the time to dig through and configure all the various plugins for wasapi, aiso, dsp, etc, Foobar exhibited a constant veil and digital hash sound compared to the others. Jriver Media Center version 23 (I think), the somewhat newly released Audirvana for PC, Foobar2k, Plex media server (and player), and Roon. About a year or so ago I did a comparison of 5 music players for PC.

Jriver nvidia shield