Upsampling on multiple devices

No. :) You also can’t.

I mean, there’s an upper limit to what the DAC will accept, so you can’t do 8x and 8x upsampling for instance.

Try both and use the one that sounds best. With older DACs upsampling made a much bigger difference than it does now.

There is a possibility in diffferences in upsampling technology. How exactly they each calculate the intermediate samples varies.

With modern DACs it seems that the biggest difference I hear has to do with the roll off filters and how upsampling affects that frequency response.  With older DACs (10 years or older) upsampling would make a huge difference, and hi rez files were a big improvement over Redbook CD playback

Upsampling is almost always done better on the server side, but...

There are a lot of caveats.

It is very difficult to get a good signal from a PC's USB port, especially if it is not a dedicated server that is optimized for audio. I have never been able to get good results from any of the PC's I have built for general use over USB. In my experience, ethernet better.

Adding the CPU burden of upsampling will not make things better if the PC has trouble making a good output at idle even though 192/24 is pretty easy to get.

JCAT and some others make fancy USB boards, but you still need a fancy power supply. It will cost less and be less hassle, and probably sound better to just get a dedicated server.

I suggest making a test. Use Fidelizer Free and see if it improves your playback - if it does, consider rethinking your approach to digital playback. This can get really complicated really fast, but you can load Daphile onto an old PC and get very impressive results for free. Plus you get to control things from your mobile device. I did this for a long time and did the upsampling on an RPi based USB bridge. It was worlds better than using my PC. I expect your BUC would be even better.

Currently I run HQPlayer Embedded and Roon on a dedicated Linux server. I had to dust off the old system recently when the internet was out for a week and I was impressed with how good it was for a very modest price.

thanks for the responses. 

my goal with the Ayon was to use the 'streaming' option over ethernet, but Ayon's implementation of this on the S3 was weak; using the search capabilities on the unit are slow and not user friendly with respect to searching for files.  In all fairness, this unit is older and is an early generation of this technology.  And i was never able to get Ayon's remote app to work.  Therefore, I got the Bryston.

I'll keep poking around with it to see if i can actually hear any differences with the various options.