Standalone music server vs Mac mini

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@Spindrift Appreciate this! It’s exactly what I’m afraid of: spending money on marginal gains and more hardware to worry about ?
Did you notice differences between ETH sources?

Hi @roestano - I’ve only used a Mac mini and a prior to that a Mac pro as roon cores and didn’t really note much difference through Ethernet - though as far as I know since there is no inherent clock signal over Ethernet - the Devialet internal clock is providing primary word clock - maybe that’s the reason it sounds so good! Jitter accumulated through a more extensive digital signal chain is minimized . . . 

I could be wrong about the Ethernet - but I think it’s packetized data .  . So I’m not sure if the source will make a huge difference . . As the signal will be clocked by Devialet no matter which device is providing the data . . As opposed to AES where the word clock is extracted from the signal.


Cheers?

There is an implied clock on Ethernet but it is not related to the audio sample clock; as you said, the data is packetised and arrives asynchronously to the Devialet's internal clock which would be used to clock samples through the audio pipeline in the DAC/amp. The same is true of USB, for that matter.