Best Digital Music Server


I am looking for opinions of the "best" digital music server considering the following:

1) CD ripping capability/available formats
2) User Interface - I am crazy from trying to ID "Unknown Albums", dropped first tracks, missing album art, etc. on my PC.
3) HiRes (is Sony's technology -as an example - audibly different?) capability.
4) Streaming flexibility - not a big part of my listening experience, but getting bigger all the time it seems.
5) Last but not least - SOUND QUALITY.  I have a reasonably nice DAC (DA2) built into my McIntosh MC2700 PreAmp, so would prefer a '"no internal DAC" solution, but open to it if all the other rankings say buy it anyway.

Thank you in advance for your opinions!

Mark
mhwilliford

Showing 1 response by spatialking

A lot of good suggestions here.  I do recommend you get something that is Roon compatible, it is just too useful a database to skip that feature.    Even if you don't plan to use it now, you can get a free trial and you might prefer it.   

Exact Copy is software you can buy for your PC, a lifetime license is dirt cheap, and it makes a bit perfect copy in either WAV, FLAC, or some lossy formats.   It is pretty good about finding the Metadata too.   It is more manual than the Bluesound Vault 2 I bought but I didn't find the BS Vault to be any better, other than being more convenient.  SQ is the same once you are in a WAV format.   

FLAC is not lossy but the streamer must uncompress the file on the fly and with a slower processor, it might make a mistake now and then.   I do believe that is the reason some folks believe WAV is better than FLAC but both are not lossy formats, so they should sound the same if the decompression is correct.