siv741

Thank you very much for your posts. A lot of food for thought. I was trying to cut corners, but I guess the best way is to really go the dedicated route, without extra components diminishing the sound duality. Going headless is not an option for me, I think, because a NAS would increase costs. Wasn’t aware of the importance of the USB port, will look into that also.

Hi everyone. I'm new here, but not completely new to computer audio. I have still a lot to learn, though. One thing I've been trying to find out in the last few days is the real impact some components have on sound quality. In particular the graphics card. I know the ideal is to simply have it onboard, included on the MB, but what if we have a spare PC, which could be put to good use as a source for nice music? Would the graphics card be very harmful? My current graphics card isn't passive, but it's virtually silent, as is the entire PC. I'd like to use this PC as music server, eventually adding an SSD, connected to a DAC, but only if it's worthy. Ideally, it would also play videos, but if that's considered a no-go I could just get a basic media player for those tasks and have the PC solely for music. Thanks in advance for all opinions.