Music Servers, Do They Matter?

@abdodson 

My experience aligns with yours; servers matter and Roon is not the best sounding software. 

I have an Innuos Zenith Mk. 3, I tried Squeezlite/Ipeng in place of Roon. The Squeezelite/Ipeng sound was a significant improvement but the Ipeng UI is incredibly poor--especially compared to Roon. 

I'm looking forward to the release of Innuos 2.0, hopefully Roon will be relegated to my Bluesound devices around the house. 

I received my Lucas Audio LDMS Music Server.  Does it make a difference?  I would not have believed it until I heard it.  I have a $30k Lampi Pacific Dac and I thought my sound was great.  That is until I started up the LDMS.  

The sound quality, the detail, the instrumentation separation was more apparent, clarity of sound was enhanced.  My overall experience has taken my system to a totally different level.  I will even say that if I would have known this I might have purchased a less expensive DAC.  

I highly recommend, if you are looking for a music server, check out Lucas Audio.  Lucas D is a computer genius.  

@willgolf,

Thanks for posting your feedback. I say this from my experience, DAC is just as important as your music streamer/server. I am in the process of upgrading my existing digital setup and the jump in SQ on DAC alone was quite a revelation. The realism I’m experiencing, gives you this profound sense of how close we can get to reality.

Some may say that the gap between DAC performances have narrowed and while I somewhat agree with that sentiment, at the end of the day you can easily tell apart products that are engineered with passion for high fidelity vs. products built to satisfy the masses.

Lalitk
When I got my Pacific it was replacing a Lumin X-1 which I loved.  IMO, there was not much of a difference in performance between the X-1 and the Pacific.  That is why I made the comment that I probably didn't need to buy the most expensive Lampi.  I wanted to try an all tube system and so I sold the X-1.  

The bottom line....the DAC is important but I can now say the Music Server is every bit as important and I am super glad I went that route.

What are you doing to upgrade your digital?

My understanding of why the quality of the streaming source or server matters is because of the EMI that these components can generate. General purpose computing devices such as PCs and Mac aren't focused on minimizing the amount of electrical noise that they generate. That has been my experience from going from a laptop to a dedicated streamer as well from hands-on experimentation. A reason to get a separate streamer & DAC is that you might like the sound of one company's DACs but they might not make the best streamers. Some things I've read about digital sound quality from people that should know:

Bob Stuart, Meridian Audio"Of course digital bits-are-bits and with due care, each of the three interfaces (USB, Toslink, coaxial) can deliver the same data at approximately the same time. But the audio we hear is analog and real-world devices are subject to a variety of interferences including data-induced jitter, other process-induced jitter, (and) common- and differential-mode electromagnetic noise. In the ideal world, the data are clocked in by and buffered in the DAC (asynchronous mode) and then de-jittered before conversion. In my experience this can never be perfect, just made closer and closer to irrelevance."

Gordon Rankin (introduced the digital audio world to asynchronous USB transfer)
When I transfer a file over USB to an external hard drive it doesn’t make transfer errors – the file at the destination is the same as the source – so why should sending digital audio over USB be any different? https://darko.audio/2016/05/gordon-rankin-on-why-usb-audio-quality-varies/


A simple model of EMI-induced timing jitter in digital circuits, its statistical distribution and its effect on circuit performance, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILITY, VOL. 45, NO. 3, AUGUST 2003: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/640/1/robinsonmp2.pdf