[earnmyturns]

The best music server is the one you have
Would love to have an Innuos or Nucleus but i don’t

Honest question: why? I can see spending $$$ on anything that connects directly to a DAC and thus needs to be electrically well designed, but on a server that stores music files and pushes them out via an asynchronous net protocol over Ethernet or WiFi? Any basic Intel NUC with either local storage or access to a NAS will do the job well. The only reason to go for the Nucleus, if you are a Roon user, is ease of setup and fanless operation. As for Innuos, I can't for the life of me understand why spend that kind of money on a network server.

If I did not have a day job I love, I think I'd set up shop as a digital music advice columnist -- Ask your Digital Uncle

 

[golfbravobravo]

Honest question: why? I can see spending $$$ on anything that connects directly to a DAC and thus needs to be electrically well designed, but on a server that stores music files and pushes them out via an asynchronous net protocol over Ethernet or WiFi? Any basic Intel NUC with either local storage or access to a NAS will do the job well. The only reason to go for the Nucleus, if you are a Roon user, is ease of setup and fanless operation. As for Innuos, I can't for the life of me understand why spend that kind of money on a network server.

If I did not have a day job I love, I think I'd set up shop as a digital music advice columnist -- Ask your Digital Uncle

I couldn't agree more on the server aspect. I was hesitant about going NUC and ROCK; it turned out to be the best decision I made wrt Roon. Very solid as opposed to either the Windows or MacOS version of the Roon server. I look at Nucleus and think "well, that saved about $800!"

 

[Ableza]

GAAAAA! Pi talk is worse than *** cat posts.

 

[golfbravobravo]

GAAAAA! Pi talk is worse than *** cat posts.

Envy is a terrible thing.........

 

[porchwizard]

I agree. That's why I went to OS X. It's much better and especially with JRiver and USB Gen5
No more Windoze for me, ever!

What's this "windows" everyone keeps talking about?

 

[Ableza]

Envy is a terrible thing.........

More like pity. I'm happy with my solution.

 

[belgiangenius]

Also, Windows sucks as a music server. (ducks and covers)

Agreed - as any kind of server!

I dislike anything Apple, so my whole house is Windows 10 and Android. Except my server is a headless Core i7 Mac Mini spanked out with 16GB RAM and 2TB of SSD space. As far as server administration and reliability goes, Apple nailed it. And Time Machine is just so awesome to run on a server. This Mac Mini serves Plex and Roon to the whole house.

 

[RCBinTN]

I dislike anything Apple, so my whole house is Windows 10 and Android. Except my server is a headless Core i7 Mac Mini spanked out with 16GB RAM and 2TB of SSD space.

Interesting

 

[Derrick Swart]

GAAAAA! Pi talk is worse than *** cat posts.

Then do not miss the special 3,1415 celebration day, coming soon: 14th of March

 

[Derrick Swart]

Honest question: why? I can see spending $$$ on anything that connects directly to a DAC and thus needs to be electrically well designed, but on a server that stores music files and pushes them out via an asynchronous net protocol over Ethernet or WiFi? Any basic Intel NUC with either local storage or access to a NAS will do the job well. The only reason to go for the Nucleus, if you are a Roon user, is ease of setup and fanless operation. As for Innuos, I can't for the life of me understand why spend that kind of money on a network server.

If I did not have a day job I love, I think I'd set up shop as a digital music advice columnist -- Ask your Digital Uncle

It is all about the electricity! But too expansive for me those ‘soecial’ streamers; my iMac (lovely x’mas present from my wife) works fine.

Honest question from me:
How digital is digital?

 

[sam6550a]

It is all about the electricity! But too expansive for me those ‘soecial’ streamers; my iMac (lovely x’mas present from my wife) works fine.

Honest question from me:
How digital is digital?

To quote an old telephone engineer "it is all battery and ground. That is all".

 

[JohnnyCanuck]

How digital is digital?

There are only 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don't.



JC

 

[earnmyturns]

Honest question from me:
How digital is digital?

Anything digital eventually involves highly nonlinear processing of an electrical signal that encodes the bits. That does not really matter much while you stay purely digital (although that's not the whole truth, recent security attacks against common CPU chips rely on analog crosstalk between digital processes). But when those electrically-encoded digital signals arrive to an electronic device whose job is to convert the digital encoding into an analog waveform -- a DAC -- then electrical noise traveling along on the electric carrier of the digital signal may muddle the analog result. Maybe not by a lot compared with other sources of distortion, but sometimes audible with some DACs and sufficiently resolving gear.

 

[earnmyturns]

To quote an old telephone engineer "it is all battery and ground. That is all".

Given how bad phones sound (and used to sound), no surprise there. But some of the best work on improving digital sound processing came from Bell Labs, showing that maybe that engineer's prejudice was not taken as gospel at the heart of the old Bell System.

 

[winders]

Agreed - as any kind of server!

I dislike anything Apple, so my whole house is Windows 10 and Android. Except my server is a headless Core i7 Mac Mini spanked out with 16GB RAM and 2TB of SSD space. As far as server administration and reliability goes, Apple nailed it. And Time Machine is just so awesome to run on a server. This Mac Mini serves Plex and Roon to the whole house.

I dislike anything Windows-based. So my house is full of Apple products and other companies servers based on some version of Unix. Windows OS, any version, to this day is an abomination.