![]() ![]() I finally realized the reason was my Mac Mini music server was now forty feet away, and came to the conclusion that, for a number of reasons I’ve described previously (“How to Optimize Digital Streaming with Optical Fiber,” TAS May, 2020), it’s not a good idea to connect a high-bandwidth general-purpose computer directly to a DAC in a high-end audio system with a standard USB cable. It took me a while to figure out why my digital “front-end” was suddenly sounding significantly better than ever. That setup served me well for another four years, but I was in for a major re-evaluation when I bought a Sonore microRendu network bridge and implemented Roon as my software of choice (sorry, Audirvana). Who’d have thought that software could influence how a ripped digital file sounded? But, it clearly did. I thought it sounded pretty good-not quite as good as my Oppo BD83SE universal disc player, and certainly not as good as an LP, but it was an easy and convenient way to listen to music when I wasn’t listening “critically.” It got better as the new USB DACs got better, and more so in 2012, when I dropped iTunes for Audirvana. My first forays in this area date back about eleven years or so, when I blithely hooked my 2006 MacBook (the black plastic one) to an HRS (remember those guys?) USB DAC. There are so many choices and configurations that it sometimes seems as if you need to consult a new class of high-end audio professional, the “network audio specialist,” to determine which solution best meets your needs. This market in high-end audio has seen so much innovation and product development that we now have “servers” that are simple headless computers (such as Intel NUCs, Mac Minis, or Roon Nuclei), network-only bridges and streamers, and fully integrated products, e.g. that have specialized in developing products that are optimized to serve up digital music files in their purest form-there’s a panoply of solutions now available. A rguably one of the most significant paradigm shifts for playing digitally encoded music in the last five years has been the introduction and development of digital “music servers.” While the term “music server” is fairly broad and potentially means different things to different people-or perhaps, more specifically, different things to companies like Roon, Aurender, Auralic, Lumin, etc. ![]()
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