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Very early in the thread, I replied to you: "John covers many of the potential technical mechanisms involved. Showing all of this at the analogue output of a DAC (measurements) is much more difficult. But if you send those 3 links to the designer/s of your own DAC/s, there is a high chance they will agree with everything John is saying there, in terms of potential technical mechanisms at play. Unless they say their DACs are immune to all the issues discussed. It may be worth you asking them (the designer/s of your DAC/s) for their thoughts." Have you asked the designer/s of your own DAC/s? Have you sent those 3 links to them? If it interests you, it would be worth knowing their thoughts maybe... And just a few posts above I already mentioned: "John has never claimed he has measurements to show these potential technical mechanisms. He has said he is building his own high resolution A-to-D converter, to hopefully show some of these differences..."

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I hinted this in that 2nd sentence you quoted... "Showing all of this at the analogue output of a DAC (measurements) is much more difficult." John has never claimed he has measurements to show these potential technical mechanisms. He has said he is building his own high resolution A-to-D converter, to hopefully show some of these differences...

I've actually got a fanless Intel i7 NUC for sale in the classifieds (linked here). I'm using it with great results. It's only up for sale because I'd like something way more powerful for some seriously more CPU intensive DSP. I'm looking to build a fanless i9-9900K, maybe in the 110W TDP Streacom DB4 fanless case.

The very opening words are "the reasons why sources and digital interconnects sound different". And then he gives his nutshell explanation. Streamers are sources. You do have to read through all this stuff very carefully, to see how it all links together (if you're interested in this stuff). Especially John Swenson's 3 part interview I linked. I think I had to read over it 3 times and I'm sure if I read it again now I'd pick up something I missed previous times. So it's all linked and comes back to the ground plane noise John Swenson discusses. As I mentioned in a previous post, when I'm listening to Tidal I don't care about ground plane noise in their overseas servers. But streamers (sources) are typically electrically coupled to your DAC... Unless you have a streamer with optical output.

A post by one of the better DAC designers on the planet (see 3rd party measurements of his Dave and Qutest DACs for example). This is very much in line with the John Swenson links I shared earlier. It all comes back to ground plane noise potentially affecting the analogue electronics, as Rob mentions.

Not a problem, happy to help. The 8th Gen refers to the '8' in the i7-8650U CPU of this NUC, as per the 1st line in the photo above (8th Generation Intel Core Processors).

G'day @Rickus Check out the last photo in the first post. The NUC7i7DNHE uses the i7-8650U CPU, part of the 8th Gen family. Here it is again though in case you missed it, where 8th Gen is mentioned twice:

Happy to drop the price to $900 posted.

Check these 2 links out. https://kb.roonlabs.com/Roon_Optimized_Core_Kit and https://kb.roonlabs.com/RoonOS_web My fanless NUC here is already running ROCK (Roon OS). With my external USB drive formatted in exFAT and connected to the NUC, my PC and Mac can see this external drive on the network, for adding and deleting files if I want. And someone can do the same if they later add their own 2.5" internal SSD drive for music storage later. There's a lot of info on the official Roon forum and here's one person with a similar question to you (wanting to access drives over the network): https://community.roonlabs.com/t/accessing-usb-storage-in-rock/51215 Highly recommend joining the official Roon forum for Q&A's. Feel free to send me a private message too for any more questions and I'll try to help. I don't want to go to deep on this classifieds listing but the above should answer your questions.

Ha. Absolutely no need to apologise for anything at all. This is all just fun and friendly discussion. Nothing too serious at all.

Assuming bit perfect transfer to the DAC input/s, the potential technical mechanisms that John discusses all play out at D-to-A conversion, so @Steffen has that right. The ground plane noise John talks about is of interest in the D-to-A stage. For example, I'm listening to Tidal now and not concerned with ground plane noise in the Tidal servers overseas. As long as the FLAC bits are getting to my DAC input bit perfectly. But the interesting stuff John discusses, beyond just 'bits are bits' (potentially) comes into play in my DAC. I recommend a careful read of all 3 parts, if anyone is interested.

Note, there's already a 250gb Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD there for ROCK and Roon database already. But you can also add your own 2.5" SSD drive later, internally, for music storage (for example). The space for it is in the photos above but zoomed in more below. The cables are already there, ready to hook-up the 2.5" SSD if you add your own later. I just used my own external 2TB USB drive for my music storage.

John covers many of the potential technical mechanisms involved. Showing all of this at the analogue output of a DAC (measurements) is much more difficult. But if you send those 3 links to the designer/s of your own DAC/s, there is a high chance they will agree with everything John is saying there, in terms of potential technical mechanisms at play. Unless they say their DACs are immune to all the issues discussed. It may be worth asking them (the designer/s of your DAC/s) for their thoughts.

@o2so A 3 part interview with John Swenson, if you have time to go through it slowly and carefully. https://www.audiostream.com/content/qa-john-swenson-part-1-what-digital https://www.audiostream.com/content/qa-john-swenson-part-2-are-bits-just-bits https://www.audiostream.com/content/qa-john-swenson-part-3-how-bit-perfect-software-can-affect-sound