adamdea
You are not a sound quality evaluation device
Arch is not music playing software it is a version of linux. Basically it's about the most stripped down hardcore version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Linux
The short answer is that it offers the advantage of ultimate purity and user unfriendliness. If server-tweaks did make a difference to SQ, it would be the thing to use.
Triode, the celebrated (but sadly AFAIK currently incommunicado) LMS plugin writer decided to create a way of running LMS on arch. This was apparently to avoid licensing problems, not because he thought it would sound better than Debian or whatever. I think the point was that he wanted to avoid using any processes which might require licensing
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?101624-Announce-Squeeze-on-Arch-developer-version
I'm not sure whether there is a Pi2 version. I spent some time installing it on my cubox-i but had a quite a few problems with it breaking whenever I updated LMS. That said other people got it working and quite a few people seem to use it on a variety of machines especially wandboards and pis. There was never enough of a cubox-i community using it to make it really viable for casual users like me.
The basic point is simply that if one really wants a stripped down operating system then its daft to start off with windows and then buy something which turns off a few of its processes: the logical thing is to start with a really stripped down OS and add only what is necessary, which is of course what you do with linux, to a greater or lesser extent depending on what flavour you are using. It's also a great thing to use for a server which you want to be ultra stable and reliable. Case in point- I recentyl resurrected my 8 year old PC in my office, which was pretty useless at running windows when I retired it 5 years ago. It runs very happily on the latest version of Debian. I use it for two things- playing music in my office using LMS and RDPing into my main computer. I have it set up with a standing desk which I use whever the fancy (or back pain) takes me. I can seemlessly move onto that machine while in the middle of drafting a document and the cursor is winking at exactly the same spot in the document. Total cost=zero. It has been running for a few months since I last switched it off and has never crashed.
This point about both efficiency and reliability was made forcefully in the squeezebox forums when server OS tweaks were suggested. There were alot of very experienced and knowledgeable linux users on that forum; unsurprisingly as they were basically the ones who adopted streaming first.
Anyway you can rest assured that if you are using volumio on a pi you are already using an efficient solution. I reckon you should choose software based on features and UI. That said I quite enjoy playing around with things like pis. It's like DIY without the solder burns.
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