What makes One Music Server Sound Better than Another?

Well, it’s clear he has never caught a chicken. 

😉

@mclinnguy

Some folks just can’t get out of their own way. They rather choose to butt heads and throw around their expertise irrelevant to the matter on hand 😊

Some folks just can’t get out of their own way. They rather choose to butt heads and throw around their expertise irrelevant to the matter on hand 😊

Now now, no need for ad hominem attacks because someone posts a contrasting viewpoint.  That reflects much more poorly on the attacker and just means you don't have any substantive point to add.  

If I were to be snarky in kind, I'd agree that my expertise is irrelevant to the matter at hand because the matter at hand is purchase decisions irrelevant to the actual objective of sound quality. 

But I won't.  Instead I will just say that I'd rather have a positive "relationship" (such as it is with a forum) with someone who loves audio even if we cannot see eye to eye on these matters than get into a flame war. The point being there are so few of us audio lovers why do we have to battle. But if you're going to flame, I'm not going to just be a target either. 

It is absolutely true that I have never caught a chicken.  Not unless it came from a drive-through window.  But I do remember when my relatives in Sicily taught my sisters how to pluck one, thinking it would be a useful skill for them in the US.  

Read the link I posted previously from Antipodes. 

I had scanned it before, but I have now read it closely.  Actually, I think it supports the position that the server end of a server-network-streamer configuration does not contribute to SQ, assuming sufficient processing resources to use DSP and avoid dropouts.

Here is what Antipodes says about their servers: 

Step 1 runs the Server app and does the best job if it is a computer with relatively high power (but not too high), and with a lot of RAM. It is the heavy-lifting stage and achieves a lot, but the power needed makes it relatively noisy (in an electronic perspective, not an acoustic one). In a car cleaning analogy, this stage is where you water-blast the big bits of dirt off, but the result is not yet acceptable.

So Antipodes does what Roon suggests: it has a high powered, electronically noisy server that decompresses the FLAC to PCM and applies DSP.  This is an acknowledgement that no matter the electro-noise at the server side, the network will clean it off for them.  

Here's what they say about their "player" side (streamer in our lingo):

Step 2 runs the Player app and this is where the essential neutrality of the sound is determined. To achieve this we use only a moderately powerful computer because we need to get the electronic noise interference levels down to much lower levels than what comes out of Step 1. 

Right.  the noise at Step 1 doesn't matter - it is "cleaned up" later.  While Antipodes allows their streamer to take credit for getting the level of electronic noise down from what the server sent, it is actually just the network that does it.  However, fine, good to have an electrically quiet streamer just to be sure.  

The remainder of the Antipodes steps are not relevant to the conversation.  The underlying point is that Antipodes itself acknowledges that it is not cleaning up the audio quality at the server end.  It is simply doing the same thing that ANY sufficiently powered computer will do.  Except, and I don't know this part, maybe there is a proprietary protocol in communicating with their streamers so that only the Antipodes server can talk to the Antipodes streamer so that you have to buy both even though the server part doesn't need to be quiet or clean or anything but a computer.  

I will say those are beautiful looking pieces and I appreciate how they relabel the backplane for audio purposes so that those who aren't comfortable with computers can use them.  However, I'd bet if you plugged a ripper into the "disk" port  or a disk into the "Ripper" port, they would work either way because they're just standard USB ports.  

Look, these guys make beautiful high end computers for use with audio.  There is nothing wrong with buying one of those.  I would if I had that kind of income.  And they cannot just come out and say "you don't need our servers to feed a streamer and get the same quality" albeit that is the natural result of what they do say.  

But, please, just don't buy into the idea that you HAVE TO have one of these to optimize sound quality.  It's a shortcut.  You know it's quality gear. But the server side simply isn't relevant to SQ.  Not as long as the server can keep up with the stream it needs to send.