C.A.P.S v4 music server.

[NickB]

What is the point of HQPlayer ?

[completeluxury]

its supposed to be fantastic upsampling software.

personally i dont use it (i will give it a try when roon headless comes out i cant run roon at all just yet) but the amount of excitement that people have about the support of HQ player leads me to believe it will definitely be something worthwhile.

[NickB]

I did a quick look at it and saw that it would up-sample to stupidly high levels and presumably this is what requires the processing power, the only observation I have is that if you are using a Devialet product which only accepts a maximum of 24/192 input will it actually achieve anything worth while (some would say that anything above 24/96 is indecipherable anyway). Also apart from sales of larger hard drives I am unsure how up-sampling a 44.1KHz CD rip to 24/384 or whatever can actually improve it.

I have to say that despite the terrible connectors used on my D400 it is sounding pretty damn good at the moment even when fed CD rips.

[completeluxury]

nick despite your (and my because i havent really looked into it) doubt that it would improve sound the program is highly recommended by all who use it.

it must be doing something?

[Bob Ryan]

When I had Lumin A1 Network Music Player in my system which was able to up-sample my music files, without exception I preferred the sound quality of my files when played at their native resolution and with every up-sampler I've heard since nothing has changed that opinion.

[Antoine]

Personally I would never buy a NUC if that's the PC that's going to be hooked up to the Devialet. It isn't fanless and it can't be expanded/modified. It's only plus is that it's relatively small.

Also it isn't really cheap and the CPU's used cannot really be compared to their desktop versions even when they're also called i3/i5/i7. The NUC's i7 for example is only dual core and won't perform any better than a 35W Core i3 desktop CPU except for the integrated graphics part.

The NUC's make great small 'video oriented' HTPC's but if anyone values the best possible SQ into USB the CAPS like solutions are a much better choice.

[Antoine]

Ok thanks for the input, will think about my future plans. And after some reading, this is a djungle and I think I am not going to build it myself if I am going to do this.

If you (Antoine) were to build it today what would you use for components if we use the CAPS v4 as a starter point?

My plan is to run ROON on it and have a bluray player in it.

Sorry, missed your question.

My ultimate setup today would probably be a dual CAPS v4 setup in series. The one that connects to the Devialet (music PC) would have the extra/changed parts (hard- and software) I already mentioned and all the default CAPSv4 parts minus the harddisk and a lower TDP Xeon. Perhaps I would also 'upgrade' it's LPSU to a full ATX LPSU.

The 'control PC' is the one that connects to the 'music PC' would also be mostly a CAPSv4 PC but would probably have a Core i5 or i7 CPU (for the integrated graphics) and a matching Z97 chipset mainboard to run Roon Core.

I would use optical fiber ethernet between control and music PC either using fiber-copper ethernet converters or NIC's that have a SFP connector (EBay ) and optical to connect the IPMI interface to the network.

[Antoine]

Also for me a PC would be either optimized for sound or video. If I would combine those functions (like I do in my own current setup) I would create a dual boot system. One partition (Server 2012 R2) then holds the "music OS" and the other the "video OS" (Windows 8/10).

[NickB]

Personally I would never buy a NUC if that's the PC that's going to be hooked up to the Devialet. It isn't fanless and it can't be expanded/modified. It's only plus is that it's relatively small.

Also it isn't really cheap and the CPU's used cannot really be compared to their desktop versions even when they're also called i3/i5/i7. The NUC's i7 for example is only dual core and won't perform any better than a 35W Core i3 desktop CPU except for the integrated graphics part.

The NUC's make great small 'video oriented' HTPC's but if anyone values the best possible SQ into USB the CAPS like solutions are a much better choice.

I think you will find that both i3 and i5 of the latest NUC are fanless and Roon say that the hardest bit about running Roon is the graphics - the Audio part is easy and not processor intensive at all.

[octaviars]

Personally I would never buy a NUC if that's the PC that's going to be hooked up to the Devialet. It isn't fanless and it can't be expanded/modified. It's only plus is that it's relatively small.

Also it isn't really cheap and the CPU's used cannot really be compared to their desktop versions even when they're also called i3/i5/i7. The NUC's i7 for example is only dual core and won't perform any better than a 35W Core i3 desktop CPU except for the integrated graphics part.

The NUC's make great small 'video oriented' HTPC's but if anyone values the best possible SQ into USB the CAPS like solutions are a much better choice.

I think you will find that both i3 and i5 of the latest NUC are fanless and Roon say that the hardest bit about running Roon is the graphics - the Audio part is easy and not processor intensive at all.

Is AIR working without any problems for you?