Neal here from Sound Science, I retail audio and design and build the Music Vault music servers. There are a number of comments about how the Sonos connect and Squeeze box sound identical to the CD in comparison. I tend to agree that the sound is very close.
A Music Server is the next level or two up from a streamer at least in the case of the Music Vaults.
When you rip your CD collection to the Music Vault and play it back through a good external DAC it will sound better most of the time than playing that CD from a CD Player even a really great player or transport. The Music Vaults do cost much more than the streamers mentioned so it may not be a fair comparison. For some one who wants the best sound available though the Music Vaults offer world class performance. They also playback from any internet radio source like Tidal or Spotify.
Up-sampling was mentioned as a positive and I would like to take exception to that statement as well as clarify.
When up-sampling from a server like the Music Vaults it will cause poor recordings to sound more listenable and good recordings to loose some of their musical texture.
Up-sampling at the server end just involves averaging the additional samples together which are the same samples in the 44.1K material.
As an example if you up-sample 44,1 k to 88.2 k then you get 2 of the same sample with in the same time period so instead of 1 sample per 1/44.1K seconds you get two of the same every 1/88.2K seconds.
No new information is presented but it does seem to help lousy recordings sound a bit smoother and a good recording gets smoother too but it doesn't help the sound in fact it looses something I like to refer to as musical texture. There are lots of discussions about this out there you can look up.
Some Dacs do have a better way of up-sampling so I am not poo-pooing this for the Dac end necessarily but I am for the server end.
My personal experience though is up-sampling Dacs have not sounded as good to me as non up-sampling.
One of the reasons the Music Vaults sound better than a CD Player is when they rip your CD the program that does this doesn't have to do things in real time and reads the data until it is certain what the correct bits are. For a CD in perfect shape it takes very little time usually 2.5 to 3.5 minutes but for CDs that are not perfect it can take much much longer.
Reading the bits correctly is a big advantage and the Music Vaults all play from Ram which is virtually jitter free.
I have also found that playback from an internal drive sounds better than streaming from a remote location. I am not saying streaming from the internet or a Network attached drive doesn't sound good, it does but in AB comparisons where the music is stored locally on the Music Vault it sounds better than music stored remotely.
This has been my experience since I started building Music Vaults.
if anyone wishes to speak with me directly I can be reached at
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