You’d be surprised by the difference in sound quality between a laptop and some of these streamers and servers. Whether it’s worth it is a personal question. 24/384 shouldn’t be seen as a limiting factor given that relatively little material is recorded at those rates. Most well recorded classical music that I can think of is recorded at 24/192. There are some exception where 24/384 is the case. Those albums are few though. You can always go with DSD if your prefer even higher. At this point, 32/768 seems more like a future proof design rather than a practical feature. My Chord Dave can handle those rates but mainly when used with the M Scaler to upscale cd quality or high res files.
p.s.
One of the main appeals of this device aside from its server functionality is that you can insert a cd and let it handle the whole process without your involvement. It saves time, which is certainly valuable and limited.
Maybe you are right, but all recording sessions I have been to have used either laptops or ordinary PCs at the recording sessions. And there are music players for computer playback that optimise them for exactly that.
And all streamers are basically just computers.
But computers that in many respects are very limited in what they can do compared to basically any modern pc or mac.
I have to admit my experience of dedicated Streamers is limited to a few auditions of Innous streamers.
But I was not very impressed by what I heard ripping the cd layer of one of my reference recordings where I have a direct reference to how the music sounded live in the hall at the actual recordings sessions. And how close to that it can sound via a good SACD player or as native DSD file via Chord Mscaler, and also upsampled to 24/705 or 32/768 pcm via the new software upsampling PGGB,
In both cases Mscaler and PGGB, the 24/705 upsampling of the native recording sounds WAY more realistic than the Innous did playing the cd rip.
That sounded like cd normally does to me ,ie not very good.
I play play lots of native hi res, but also quite a lot of cds and my best results with cds come from either Chord Mscaler and optical out from a good cd transport or recently the software based PGGB upsampled cd rip to 32/768khz and my mbp via usb.
And yes the cd ripped on my mbp and played via usb out from my mbp as PGGB upsampled is possibly the best SQ I have yet heard from any 16/44.1 pcm recording.
Basically like playing a 24/96 hi res recording in my systems both via headphones HD 800 and HEKV2 and my electrostatic speakers.
Cheers CC