Suggest me a Music server

[dark-knight]

A colleague at work who probably has more money than sense was going to buy this http://soundgalleries.com/product/sgm-2015/ as a music server for his rather very expensive system.

I was looking at the specification of the unit and saw that the main innards of the system are: Specifications :- Processor, Intel Skylake i7 6700K. Memory, 16 GB DDR4. SSD, 1 TB. of which I think I could get the parts for about £715.

Would anyone who has a vast knowledge of these things be able to spec me a kick ass, fan less or extremely quiet. Solid built system in which I could prove to my colleague he is wasting his money on this rather extravagant piece of hardware. And go the media player route instead. Or, better still know of a company that specialize in this type of thing for a reasonable price.

Thoughts and suggestion appreciated.... oh has to be less than the 16,000 euros.

 

[dark-knight]

Intel nuk running roon. Roon is a brilliant music server app.
The nuk is overkill for just roon, but it means it'll have the horsepower to also run Dirac room correction software. At that level, your friend should at least trial Dirac to see if it's worth the effort. Spend the rest of the cash on a good usb connected dac

I think he has a DAC his system is worth about 40K so it better at that price. Ill have a word with him and see if he can see sense.

 

[dark-knight]

Spoken to my colleague who would like to up-sample PCM and DSD to 512 DSD using HQ player software. The main issue he is concerned with is the process power needed for the up-sampling thus generating heat and also fan noise.

Would a NUC be powerful enough for the up-sampling whilst not getting to hot/ loud with the fans running ?. Or can a passive cooling unit be bought which would do the same up-sampling in almost silence ?.