BTW, how would you characterize the sound of your Boulder?
 

the 866 is very transparent. I’d say it’s neutral with extremely low noise floor. It will give you a very good idea of what upstream components and cables are doing. 
With my digital and analog setups it sounds natural and provides a fatigue-free listening experience for hours on end. I was hoping that it would compete extremely well with the Pass separates that it replaced but the 866 is more articulate and engaging to listen to. Overall I like it more than the Pass gear I replaced with it. Coming up on two years in July.

Today, I completed the transition of my NUC music server from Roon Optimised Core Kit, ROCK to DBpoweramp Asset UPnP with a stripped down Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC. I haven’t completely written off Roon as I’ve still got to compare it to Asset on the Windows NUC.

This has been the last leg in my improve the sound of streaming project over the past few months. All that’s left to do is convert a number of albums of DSF files to FLAC and generally tidy up the tagging. So tonight I’ve sat down and listened to the final results of my efforts. It’s only been local files ripped from CDs and not Qobuz so far.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I’m delighted with the sound. My phono stage is out action at present so I can’t make a definitive comparison with vinyl. However, it is certainly involving like vinyl. Are there even degrees of involvement? I’d argue that it’s either involving or it isn’t.

@newton_john 

Interesting question "are there degrees of involvement?" I might say that there are types of involvement. Earlier I streamed Horowitz playing Rachmoninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto with Fritz Reiner conducting. The sound was from an old record, compressed, but Horowitz's playing was so unusual, as if he were tripping to find the notes. As if he could hardly remember the piece. Yet he was explosive and I was totally involved. So, that's one type. Another could be when the sound of the recording is beautiful.

Full text linksCite

AbstractPubMedPMID

Abstract

Interindividual differences in music-related reward have been characterized as involving five main facets: musical seeking, emotion evocation, mood regulation, social reward, and sensory-motor. An interesting concept related to how humans decode music as a rewarding experience is music transcendence or absorption (i.e., music-driven states of complete immersion, including momentary loss of self-consciousness or even time-space disorientation). Here, we investigated the relation between previously characterized facets of music reward and individual differences in music absorption. A first sample of participants (N = 370) completed both the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ) and the Absorption in Music Scale (AIMS). Results showed that both constructs were highly interrelated (r = 0.78, p < 0.001), indicating that higher music reward sensitivity is associated with a greater tendency to music-related absorption states. In addition, four items from the AIMS were identified as suitable to be added to an extended version of the BMRQ (eBMRQ). A second sample (N = 550) completed the eBMRQ for a validation study. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on the whole sample (N = 920) showed the reliable psychometric properties of the eBMRQ and suggested that taking into account an absorption facet could contribute to a better characterization of individual differences in the sensitivity to experience music-related reward and pleasure.

Keywords: absorption; music; reward; transcendence

@newton_john 

I'm reading a book about the left and right brains. The left brain is for language, math, symbolic things, and the right brain just knows things empirically. It passes the knowledge to the left brain which breaks it down into symbols which can never capture the complete picture. The writer suggests that music was our first language, right brain speaking to right brain, or the right brain taking in the music of our world. 

As an artist I understand this because I am constantly trying to excape my left brain and let my right brain create art. It just knows that this is the color that belongs there on the painting without having to analyze why. It knows that this stanza follows that stanza in a poem even though you don't know why or what it means. I think people who "get"  music have access to their right brain and don't need to try to "understand" things. They simply do understand music without trying. BTW right brain can also be called the "unconscious mind."

So, I do think there are a lot of ways to become immersed in music. I have listened to music on a $100 stereo and enjoyed it totally. Now that I can afford something that sounds like real live music, I also enjoy that totally. But I can also listen to music on my Tivoli radio and get involved. I think that having a nice stereo is a cool thing if you can afford it. But whatever I've been able to afford, I've always enjoyed recorded music on it.

Because the music is just a means of creative composers expressing their vision of the world to us in ways that cannot be understood symbolically. Sure the musician reads music off a page, but if they don't really understand the music's emotions and passions, etc., they can't really play it.