Music Server with no DAC?

The only price I could find on the Nuforce MSR is $2250. Seems to me that a computer could likely be configured to provide similar functionality for a lot less money.

Exactly.....

Subscribed. Interesting discussion here...

"...Seems to me that a computer could likely be configured to provide similar functionality for a lot less money"

Yes, of course you can provide similar functionality with a computer, no question about it. The big question is how will you deal with very noisy environment - if your goal not functionality but musicality.

The "mortal" problem of NuForce music server, on my opinion, is that it cannot output signal with sampling rate greater then 96kHz. Since, even today there are recordings available in 176 kHz (Reference recording) and 192 kHz (Chesky) its already obsolete

All The Best
Rafael

Indeed!

I emailed one place and they said they didn't want to do that particular thing because because their device was based around ultimately what was a 24/96 DAC chip, and anything else gets uprezzed to 24/96 in a pre-processing step - apparently a lot of them work like this - so they would have to change out their main DAC pieces and re-engineer the whole things and uprez to 24/196 or whatever so just to say it takes a whole re-engineer to change out the master chips and go to the next level. And the company I had emailed said when there is more material available they will do it but as it is they are waiting for more material to be available.

And on that note NuForce has a history of relatively frequent upgrades compared to other companies, so perhaps they will do it sometime relatively soon.