Absolute top tier DAC for standard res Redbook CD

11-03-14: Mattnshilp

I have said, and will say again, that I think one of the big reasons my OSDE keeps beating the competition is because of its internal Off Ramp tecnhnology.

....if you are using a computer as a music source, the ODSE is practically impossible to beat for close to it's price.

That first point was made by others at the beginning of this thread. One logical conclusion is to buy an Off Ramp (or something like it) for your existing dac. In an ideal (or future) audio world, a server will do this for you. Its simply an engineering lag with computers as our fish with legs....

I believe music servers are the future, I agree with Agear +1!

If you use a computer as source, the current rages are HQPlayer upsampled to DSD256 in Windows ASIO or Windows Server 2012R2 in CORE mode.

I have been told that straight USB beats any converter with these two approaches, so maybe the low hanging fruit is optimization of software filtering, or killing needless computer background processes.

I think servers are a better way to go, by far, depending on how they are built and how they run. Yes, less is always going to be more in programs.

The servers are "theoretically" better because they are already optimized for audio, and should be minimized for this. The Totaldac Server is the best that I have tried.

Look for the ones that continually update software, and the companies that can do custom software for your setup even. For example, and in my case, the way the router and NAS communicate with each other and the server. This can all be changed. Chose the LAN transfer rate, fifo settings, etc... This is all very important for the sound.

With the softwares Vincent (Totaldac) has available, I can drastically change the way my system sounds. It is really quite extraordinary, and on the level of entire component changes.

11-04-14: Wisnon
If you use a computer as source, the current rages are HQPlayer upsampled to DSD256 in Windows ASIO or Windows Server 2012R2 in CORE mode.

I have been told that straight USB beats any converter with these two approaches, so maybe the low hanging fruit is optimization of software filtering, or killing needless computer background processes.

Winson, have you been told the theory on why that's better? How is jitter addressed?