Standalone music server vs Mac mini

[thumb5]

Hi roestano

Can you help me understand what you mean by "However, I’ve noticed Roon downsampling to 24bits as Eth is capped. USB has more room for bits." please.  I've not heard of this suggestion Eth (which I'm assuming is ethernet) is capped (which I might be misinterpreting to mean limited).

Thank you
jim

Your assumptions are all correct Jim. Ethernet is limited compared to USB bitrate. And I assume Roon automatically corrects by downsampling. I am going to experiment and connect the USB port for the first time. Hope this helps.

Not sure why you are worried about the bit rate of Ethernet being "limited" compared to USB...? As far as I know, USB 3.0 has a raw transfer rate of 5 Gbps, vs up to 10 Gbps for wired Ethernet.  That difference in maximum throughput is probably completely academic for normal audio streaming purposes: for example a 32-bit, 384 kHz stereo stream uses "only" about 25 Mbps of raw bandwidth (excluding protocol overheads).