I don't know if some don't get it,but ALL servers ARE COMPUTERS. They all have noise producing motherboards, most run off noisy switching power supplies, and they connect rendering ports directly to this noisy motherboard. They also use the clocks off motherboards, you'll never get quality rendering out of these computers they call music servers. Certainly, they have some advantages over regular old general purpose computers, mostly in form of optimized operating systems, and most attend to motherboard noise in various ways. But to realize big gains over gs computers requires going to music servers that do quality rendering and/or separate streamer which requires adding a switch if not already incorporating one. The high end server is likely the superior means of doing things, simple and optimized all in one. I'm talking $10K up servers, and some of these don't even do highest quality rendering. So, we can then go to separate streamer, who cares about quality rendering within server at this point, server is only going to contain music player library and do processing for music player such as Roon. So then we need to do the quality rendering in streamer, I think this is the way to go for many, lots of good streamers and lps to power them, spend like $2k for variety of servers, power it by lps, then streamers all over the place in price, all likely preferable to crap rendering off server motherboards. The streamer will generally have advantage in noise as its such a simple circuit compared to complex server motherboards, and you'll nearly always have superior clock to the motherboard clock on non optimized servers. Get an lps for streamer, good to go. By the way, streamers ARE COMPUTERS as well, just simplified to serve far fewer purposes.
I just don't get the continued fascination with all the rendering cleaners, reclockers, filters, blah, blah, blah. Do the job right with getting the rendering done optimally in first place, the dac usb board, if good one, will do the rest of the job. You can't do any better than getting these two things right, simple, direct, optimized. Or do as Latik says, take care of the streamer from within the dac, then you only have to concern yourself with server rendering.
I understand many are mislead by the many good reviews of these 'band aid' items. @tjag The guy with Devialet has so much complexity with his streaming setup I can't make heads or tails of it. As mentioned previously, good reviews likely due to lowered noise floor with these devices, hell, I've seen guys daisy chain these devices, most report positive outcomes. The point I'm trying to make is people are spending far more money than need be for less than optimal results. I don't doubt people are hearing better sound quality with these devices, just better ways to do it then complexity and the marginal gains people getting with these devices.
I'll continue to repeat, these devices are only band aids. The INITIAL rendering is perhaps the most important process in streaming audio, it is the first in line in passing music signal, get it wrong and you'll never hear full potential of streaming. You cannot REPAIR or FIX what you got wrong in first place, the incorrect timing and noise produced DURING the rendering process cannot be taken back.
I'd suggest for anyone not currently optimizing rendering, dump the band aids, get a server or streamer with optimized rendering and report back on sound quality. I bet everyone will have larger, more organized sound stage, and more natural, analog like presentation, some may also experience more low level information. All this assuming one's system has sufficient resolving capability.
And I have experienced the difference between proper rendering vs usb decrapifier in that at one point I had Uptone USBRegen, thought it nice addition until I experienced decent rendering via SOTM SMS 200 Neo.While the Uptone not the last word in usb filtering,it was easily bested by SOtm which is also not last word in rendering. Beyond this experience, I've learned from greatly informed and knowledgable streamers and designers. Put that together with informed logic and you'll find this is valid path for obtaining optimal streaming sound quality.
