What makes One Music Server Sound Better than Another?

I absolutely agree with @jji666 .  And there’s a ton of support for his position from a subset of the audiophile community, that includes engineers, designers, Roon Labs itself!  

There seems to be a bias embedded in the arguments from a different subset of audiophiles.  It goes like this:  “I hear a difference.  If you don’t hear a difference, my experience trumps yours.”  That makes no sense from a logic perspective.  In the absence of any other explanations, those two observations have equal weight.  It is certainly possible that one person has a more resolving system, and/or better ears, but ceteris paribus, they have equal weight.  But then, when you introduce the digital science, that seems to give more weight to the listener who hears nothing.  But wait, the first listener hears a difference, that has to be explained by science too, doesn’t it?  Well yes, as a matter of fact, there’s a whole science behind confirmation bias.  Now to be clear, the second listener is also susceptible to confirmation bias, perhaps to hear nothing.  But on balance, the better argument goes to the second listener, because that argument does not require an assumption about greater resolution, golden ears, pseudo science, or faith, to make sense.  

Btw, when I started my own journey on the streaming side, before I did any serious research, I assumed I’d hear a huge qualitative difference when I changed servers and cobbled together a Raspberry Pi as one of my first post-retirement projects (i.e., my own bias was to hear differences).  Just my two cents….

@jji666 You have done your homework, I commend you on your perseverance. It's obvious you know more about computers than I do, and I think you are a better arguer. But I don't think people buy Porsche's just because they look nice and they want to brag about them. 

All I'm going to say is what I said before: take your server/player to somewhere where their is a high-end "audiophile" server/player, setup with appropriate highly revealing other components and cables and compare. 

Dear jji666, you miss the point about catching chickens.  Here is the point:  You can talk about how best to catch a chicken but until you have experience catching chickens, what you have to say is mostly meaningless.  

The First Rule of Audio:  Your system sounds great, until you hear a better system.

If you truly love audio, stop postulating, get out there and hear some good hifi systems and some hifi streamers/servers for yourself.  You might or might not hear a difference.  That’s ok.  It’s a personal matter.  Music, like all art is personal.

The issue that one person can hear something that another doesn’t is much much deeper than confirmational bias.  That’s merely a cop out for the ASR crowd.  Many factors come into play beyond the listener variable.  A good example was what happened last week to me.  I found a song on Qobuz that had some bad microphone clipping.  Sounds like crackling noise.  I have a very high resolution system.  The noise was like a slap in the face.  I texted my cousin to try that track on his stereo.  The track sounded fine to him.  I played the track on my iPhone with headphones and I played it in the car.  I could not detect the mic clipping at all in either case.  I bought the CD.  The CD plays cleaner than the Qobuz version but the clipping is still there- just not as bad.  I ripped the CD to FLAC and the same thing.  But on the Roon app I can see that the recording levels are maxed out.  That’s one of the downsides to a high resolution system.

@tonywinga 

I think your example misses the point (by a mile or more).  My home system is way more resolving than my car system, of course.  I always hear more on a more resolving system, of course.  The only question here is whether a change in servers - beyond basic performance parameters - can contribute anything to that increased resolution.