Music Server Recommendation

The onboard vs NAS arguement is a tough one for some people to get.

In the world of digital the packeted music going into the server may actually sound better than the onboard music via the ssd. As per packeted out that is a tougher call, as many fine dacs are only usb input.

We do have the Light Harmonic USB cable that has a femto reclocker built into the cable and boy is it amazing, it does cost $2,000.00 so it isn’t cheap but it beats everyother digital cable we have tested so far.

As per not embracing the NAS that is unfortunate we are running a QNAS with 8 bays and 32TB of storage with 21 TB active on a Raid 4 configuration and the QNAS Rocks.

If the reason you are not looking for a NAS is there is no ethernet in my audio room, most of these servers will require a Wireless to wired ethernet bridge to work as well.

The other option is to purchase a demo MK II and then upgrade it to the MK III when you are ready.

If you have additional questions please give us a shout we are one of the best stocked digital dealers in the country with the following digital products on display: Naim, Innous, Baetis, Lumin and Aurender servers,

Dacs, NAD, Mytek, Nuprime, Aqua Hifi, T+A, Light Harmonic, Lumin, Naim

Digital cables Wireworld, Light Harmonic.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

There have been good suggestions in this thread, but my personal favorite is the Lampizator superkomputer.  A lot of the performance is hardware, but also software and operating system.

I've found the Lampizator both had impeccable hardware and power supplies on top of being customizable more than others.  The SQ difference among the elite servers is a negligible, so I made the decision on customization.

 It's also by far the best looking and comes in a secure flight case to ensure less potential shipping damage.  If you've read stereophile or shipped lots of good in the past, you'll realize that tons of things break in shipping and it's not always obvious. Companies that pay extra attention to shipping get my business more than others.

IMO, the typical music servers that are talked about in this thread,  are based on old technology. IMO, if you have to connect something using a USB cable to an external dac, it’s old technology. The new technology involves using a “bridge”. I have been using the PS Audio DS with network bridge II and it sounds much better than the music servers I have had or auditioned for the last 12 years. Read the review of the DCS network bridge in Stereophile from last Nov. when I purchased the PS Audio piece, I was happy to sell my external music server and the AQ Diamond USB cable

Call me an ignoramus if you like but I do have a little trouble understanding this.

Lets take Tidal and Deezer 16/44 red book quality streaming.
How does any higher end music server make this sound better than from my Bluesound Vault2?

I mean they cannot extract any more information than is there so is the reasoning that say the vault2 is not extracting all of the information bit perfect?

What am i missing in my comprehension?
And I am ONLY referring to streaming services that are currently available, discounting Tidal MQA for now.

I have been considering a change but having a hard time understanding what more I could get with streaming.

I presently send the data from the vault2 to my Lyngdorf2170 via digital coax

Rbstehno, your comments are totally odd. A network bridge is doing exactly the same thing a server is doing. A per USB being somehow inferior it all depends on implimentation of the cable, the dac and the server.

The Audioquest Diamond is not state of the art in any way, we started with the Diamond as it was really the first high end USB Cable, and then we graduated to the Wireworld Platinum which was even better sounding, then we moved to the Enklein pure silver, which was better still than the Wireworld and then we found the Light Harmonic cable Lightspeed, which has a Femto reclocker built into the cable and this is the most remarkable USB cable we have yet tested.

A Network bridge is taking packeted audio from the Network and then in the case of the DCS then outputing to the Dac via AES or SPDIF or USB.

If you are looking to do the highest sampling frequencies of Quad Rate DSD a standard AES or SPDIF cable will not pass those frequencies nor will the DCS bridge.

Now it also depends on which servers you were using before the DCS bridge, the Innuous sounds way better tha the Aurender we sell both.

You may have had decent but not a state of the art server before you moved to the DCS piece.

You are also missing the user experience which Roon brings which makes listening to music a much more exploratory experience.

Uberwaltz, you are missing the concept of upconversion or cross conversion. By emploing a server which allows you to change or cross convert you can create a psuedo high resolution data stream from a 16 bit 44k sample. The actually difference between a true high resolution sample and a reprocessed one may be completely undiscernable.

We routinely take Tidal data stream, upconvert through our Innous server to our Light Harmonic Davinci and listen to all music at Quad Rate DSD and the sound is glorious.

Server with Roon, and the ability to upconvert or crossconvert can dramatically create a much more analog like sound even with a standard Redbook digital data stream.

Labtec the difference between reference servers is hardly neglibile we heard major differences between the Innuous Zenith, the Baetis Reference x, and the Memory Player.

The difference is a combination of hardware, software and implimention of all of the different factors. As per packing a good cardboard box can be very effective, if you don’t think you aren’t paying extra for the fancy flight case that you will never use again you got another thing comming.

We are really looking forward to our new Innuous Statement which employs a totally custom designed motherboard, a state of the art USB output board, a temperature controlled clock, custom software. This will be the best sounding sever on the market, save your pennies at $13k it will not be cheap, but it should set a new reference for a digital front end.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ