Ahriakin

I don't think any empirical measurement or 3rd party testimony could ever convince me that I wasn't hearing what I believe myself - why should I trust someone else to tell me whether I am enjoying something more . I've seen to many arguments supposedly based in science where the authors present only half truths or blatant misunderstandings that suit their argument, just as bad as those made by their opposition in most cases. I have yet to find anyone I would trust enough to colour my own opinions, and would not deign to think my own technical knowledge is 100% 'right' either. More importantly I think that while it is important to understand and work with the vast range of audio technology at our fingertips in this day and age it is all to easy to get lost in the science and lost sight of the simple experience. At the same time I absolutely believe that this experience is influenced by knowledge of the audio path - expectations, hopes (and a need to justify expenditure ) all play a part as the enjoyment of music is obviously not just a physical/auditory experience but also a mental/emotional one. Both play a part so ultimately if someone believes that the component, hi-res file etc. they just shelled out for should improve their sound then it likely will to them. Whether you could empirically prove the 'quality' of the sound had improved or not is completely and utterly irrelevant as their experience has.

Everyone has to start somewhere. My hifi journey began in college very modestly but with a will to improve, I spent what was at the time a huge amount of my income on improving it over the years. By the time I emigrated and had to sell of most of it my HiFi was worth a year of my salary...at the age of 28 that was not exactly a huge sum but relatively it was gold. None of my friends went so far but they all appreciated my passion and most the quality of the result, many went further than they would have down the same path otherwise. Being exposed to better sound prompted the same desire. Where I think it started going wrong was SACD and DVD-Audio. I was an early adopter of both and absolutely loved them, SACD in particular....with the sad fact that there was a dearth of music I was actually interested in for either format I eventually gave up. Now over a decade after the move/sell-off I have started getting back to higher end audio. I picked up some nice headphones and a lovely new Matrix X-Sabre DAC, the latter being heavily influenced by my admiration of DSD and it's apparent resurgence as downloadable. The same for high-resolution PCM....and I've run straight into the same issue. If you like Blues, Jazz or Classical you're covered, anything else and it really is pot luck. I have nothing against those genres, they're just not my personal taste or that of anyone I know. While I don't begrudge those who do love them access the simple fact is that I think the same attitude that killed early high-res audio is retarding current adoption. Execs decided that they needed to win the Vinyl crowd, that they were the only real hold outs from digital and they'd happily make the jump when they heard the new formats so they released titles they figured matched that generation (while fully understanding why some folks preferred analog over digital the folks that had the investment in existing material and the necessary high-end equipment to appreciate it were a generation unto themselves). I think they believed that if this generation of proven audiophiles adopted the format everyone else would follow. Completely wrong in so many ways. Their target audience did not trust digital, plain and simple, they weren't about to buy high end equipment from a technology they felt strongly was innately incapable of providing quality music. The other friends or peer audiophiles who could have inspired or been inspired in turn on hearing SACD for example never got a chance, then when prices lowered and availability of options like the PS3 appeared they still had such a limited scope of material that nobody bothered - besides they had MP3...and that was perfect right?....yeah, great job of education their marketing depts did on that one. I think with current technology, affordable high-res capable DAPs and internet bandwidth there is a real chance for quality audio to take back the mainstream market but only if the label marketing execs get off their asses and stop being so traditionally lazy, then blaming the consumer for not taking it up when it really is about the choice of music. If someone truly loves it they will find a way to pay for it, and it will all get cheaper and work it's way down the affordability ladder.

You can use JRiver MC 19 as an Asio device, that covers anything that can output to Asio but no use for general windows...they are also working on a WDM driver. I believe it also has a live-listen loopback function that could help but I've not played with it, and don't have my audio PC to check with now.

NAS is generally not competitively priced in terms of storage space vs. a similarly equipped old PC. What you are paying for is reduced power use/heat/noise etc. little or no OS headaches and dynamic redundancy options (RAID). That last point cannot be emphasized enough, having just gone through a few rounds of fixing my badly tagged library those are many man-hours of tedium I don't want to have to go through again - using RAID 5 on my NAS reduces that risk (and then also copying the entire thing to NAS 2...hey I'm paranoid about data loss ). Now you can still run RAID on most PCs, even if they don't have the service integrated into the BIOS there are software RAID solutions out there, there is a cost in overall efficiency but for streaming relatively light data like music (unless you're looking at multiple DXD streams ) that shouldn't be a big deal but there are still those environmental considerations (power/heat/noise/space (WAF...) again).