Deqx pre8

FYI: I have been experimenting with a couple of 384kHz/32-bit FLAC music files and I found that the Pre-8 plays these files with no problem when rendered directly from my NAS through Volumio. There should not be any down conversion going on since the ESS Saber D/A chip in the Pre-8 should be able to easily render these files.

On the other hand, when the same files are served through LMS (Lyrion Music Server) through the LMS DNLA/UPnP bridge plug-in, the file appears to be playing when viewing its progress on the Volumio player screen, Though the Volumio screen states that the file is in-fact 384kHz/32-bit and progresses right along, I do not hear any sound. I’m still trying to figure this one out.

A fascinating discussion - found it by googling the new Pre-8.

Years ago I played (suffered) with the HDP series. Larry made things effortless and was a phenom but at the end of the day I found that this devices is more for people that like to play rather than listen to music. It was simply too complicated to set up, but even after setting it up it suffered from bugs that would remove the romantism from listening to music. Often times it would start to pop, or bug out / crash and so forth. This was an HDP-5.

I, too played with ribbons. Apogee Scintilla and then other open baffle speaker designs (of my own, or 3rd party). I finally gave up once I heard the units were being discontinued and thought maybe I'd give it another go with the newer "beta" units. But from what I'm reading here the issues are there but in a different way. And yeah, the strange random lack in comms from the HQ company didn't help. They would pick and choose when to respond and you really didn't feel supported at times. Somehow whenever I get the bug to go "active", after staring at more amps, more wires and dealing with bugs I get the "let's go back to basics", plug in the stock crossover, less amps and wow the sound is just better. Or maybe it's just more reliable. Forrestc I hope you keep it up and convince me to try it again. 

and I should quantify I'm an IT engineer, deeply understand computing, enterprise networks and electronics. So if it was tough for me, I couldn't imagine others (watching your response above about modifying the host file / vpn's, resolving .local DNS entries and the likes made me wince! - not because you were wrong per say but imagine the audience even understanding what that is lol).