Suggest me a Music server

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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. :eek:
 
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Raspberry Pi and a 7" touchscreen and DAC of your choice and plug hard drive into Pi or play music from NAS = happy ears and wallet :)

Will also act as a music server so you can play the same audio around your home

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Squeezebox touch + NAS +/- DAC. iPad + NAS + Apple TV + DAC. Raspberry pi + DAC. Cyrus DAC XP + NAS. So many better options. Why on earth do you need £715's worth of hardware to run a music server? A modern network attached storage device will be absolutely plenty.

I would first choose a really awesome DAC and work from there. €16,000 seems totally outrageous unless the software is totally bespoke and awesome.
 
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Man of Honour
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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
 
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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.
 
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At that price, likely to be something like a DCS unit. DCS are well known for doing USB well, so that might be a decent solution.
I'm assuming he'll already have some Ipads kicking around. The Roon iOS app will make him happy, it's very very good to use.
 
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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 ?.
 
Man of Honour
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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 ?.

If heat a noise are an issue, put the server in another room and stream to an Roon "end point". There's plenty of options and that requires virtually no horsepower. Even a Pi3 can happily do it, so it's cheap option.
 
Man of Honour
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He has more money then sense. There's no need to spend anything like that amount on a DAC :eek:

Do you regularly make similar comments on Swiss watch forums, Lambo forums or similar?
If he has the dosh and thinks it's worth the money, it's his choice.

And I have to ask, have you ever heard a system in that kind of league?
 
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Do you regularly make similar comments on Swiss watch forums, Lambo forums or similar?
If he has the dosh and thinks it's worth the money, it's his choice.

And I have to ask, have you ever heard a system in that kind of league?

That's a pretty stupid comparison that just doesn't work.

I haven't said it wasn't his choice have I? I said it's a waste of money. If you understand anything at all about HIFI and particularly DACs then you'll know why I said that.

Whether you can afford to spend £40K on a DAC or not, it is doing nothing better than a £500-£1000 DAC which is the most I would and have spent on one.

Once you have decent DAC chips in dual deferential configuration with a quality linear PSU then anything more isn't going to improve the neutrality of the conversion. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking ****. Remember, all a DAC is supposed to do is convert the digital signal to analogue as faithfully as possible.

You have to be a special kind of idiot to spend £40K on something that performs no better than something costing 1/40th of that price. At least with a Lambo you are getting the performance you're paying for.
 
Man of Honour
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That's a pretty stupid comparison that just doesn't work.

I haven't said it wasn't his choice have I? I said it's a waste of money. If you understand anything at all about HIFI and particularly DACs then you'll know why I said that.

Whether you can afford to spend £40K on a DAC or not, it is doing nothing better than a £500-£1000 DAC which is the most I would and have spent on one.

Once you have decent DAC chips in dual deferential configuration with a quality linear PSU then anything more isn't going to improve the neutrality of the conversion. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking ****. Remember, all a DAC is supposed to do is convert the digital signal to analogue as faithfully as possible.

You have to be a special kind of idiot to spend £40K on something that performs no better than something costing 1/40th of that price. At least with a Lambo you are getting the performance you're paying for.

Guess we'll share a difference of opinion on that then.
I owned the 2nd ever DAC sold in the marketplace, a Musical Fidelity digilog unit and have used DACs on and off since, which is roughly over a 28 year period. During that time, I've heard all sorts from £100 DACs to multi thousand £ DACs, including those from DCS. Esoteric, Wadia, Linn etc.
My existing Meridian most certainly doesn't sound like the sub £1k units I've heard.

As for the comparison with watches, frankly it's even more relevant. Having owned some supposedly "good" automatic watches (last Swiss one was a Zenith), I know only too well how good a job they do of their primary task, i.e. telling the time. In short, Swiss autos can happily cost as much as a DCS DAC, yet tell the time worse than a cheapy Eco drive unit.
 
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