What makes One Music Server Sound Better than Another?

@tonywinga 

Sorry, missed your question above.  Yes, I do much of my “serious” listening using my vinyl front end, both on my “big rig”, and on my “vintage” basement system.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I find well engineered digital systems to have far less differences per $ spent; I actually preferred my Gold Note (with optional separate power supply) to my friend’s >$10k dcs DAC, where we were A/Bing 4 different DACs in his highly resolving, solid state system.  

Let's face it, vinyl is a high noise, low signal-to-noise ratio medium.  But there’s something magical about a vinyl system done well, and it plays so well with my tube amps.  And for a single malt scotch drinker, it just doesn’t get any better!

The K41 server has two ethernet ports- one purposed for input and one purposed for output to the player.

This is a cool configuration.  I happened upon something similar by accident when I was trying to shield my very old, but still super quiet and super useful, streaming Windows 7 machine from the internet.  I just connected it to the second LAN port on my Roon Server.

What isn't personal is how IP networks function.  What isn't music is what goes from the server to the streamer. 

OK, I can see how that comes off as pedantic.  It wasn't intended to be so - I was excited to point out something I'd read another poster say over at the Roon forum, which is that it's better not to think of what your Roon server transmits as data, not music.  Anyway, please, continue on the other topics and let's move on from the core debate...

@jji666 “I believe I've already done this without having to take it anywhere.  I've built all level of servers, from the AudiophileStyle's totally quiet fanless model with no moving parts and using the various OS tweaks that are/were supposed to bring OS operations to the quietest levels possible, to powerful beasts that may clearly have noisy electro-stuff.  I mean, I have probably built 15 Roon servers.  All flavors. The transmitter in a network configuration just cannot generate a different sound.

I've been designing and building media computers for over 30 years - I'm not just guessing here. “
 

The arrogant puffery here is funny for its sheer lack of social inhibition. There has to be a special word for this sort of ignorance. 🤔 - I don’t mean to upset you, jji666, but have you ever wondered how all the posturing would come across if one day you discovered your beliefs were false? A little restraint goes a long way : )

In friendship - kevin.

The arrogant puffery here is funny for its sheer lack of social inhibition.

Boy, this is a game of whack-a-mole, that’s for sure. But what really gets me is that when someone has nothing substantive to offer, they have to attack the messenger. Sorry to disturb your pro-fancy-server echo chamber.

The fact is that one poster told me to "get out there and try some servers" (paraphrased) and another used that old construct of "my system is more resolving so I must be correct." So I described my experience, both with servers and resolving systems, in order to respond to their assumption that I was speaking without experience.

I advocate keeping an open mind. But those that state beliefs contrary to science and engineering are the ones that need to back up their assertions with evidence.

arrogant puffery

It’s not puffery if it’s true. In terms of arrogant, I suggest you check the tone of your own post.

I advocate keeping an open mind. But those that state beliefs contrary to science and engineering are the ones that need to back up their assertions with evidence.

I disagree, you seem quite closed minded. And excuse me but none of us "need" to do anything other than listen and explain what we hear.

But I am still posting. While looking at a review for another Antipodes mentioned in a different thread in the forum here I found this quote from their CEO- now tell me if you do the same thing when you build your "fancy" servers:

Mark Jenkins:

“The motherboards are sourced from the world’s best supplier and they cost around 6 times what some of the competitors are using. We tune the motherboards to shift the frequency peaks of the noise generated by each component in order to eliminate noise nodes, so the mainboards start as an off-the-shelf board and then are customized for our use.”

Antipodes also places a lot of emphasis on the quality of the power supply, which they manufacture entirely in-house.

Mark Jenkins:

“What we did with the new power supply was to test the injection of noise into the motherboard at various frequencies to see which frequencies did the least damage to the sound quality, and then we designed the power supply board in such a way that the noise component was in the benign frequencies. This has a similar effect as a zero noise power supply.”

Antipodes CX