I have a Mac Mini right now which I use to upsample everything to DSD128.Plays well for the most part but I have to run fans at 5000 rpm to keep the mini from getting to hot.Runs at about 82c.So I’ m sure that it will shorten the life of the mini.Have a day capable of DSD256.Here is the ? I have the opportunity to buy a PCs at a very reasonable price.The computer has a Xeon E5-2620 v2.Specs on processor is 15mb cache,6 core 12 thread.Processor frequency 2.1,turbo 2.6.Wondering if slow speed would be a problem.Can add a second processor to motherboard if needed.16gb of ram with plenty of room to add more.Quadro K 4000 videos card and windows 10.Would use this computer to upsample everything to DSD256.Would this computer be sufficient? Looking for opinions ? Thanks
Why do you do that? What do you expect from this upsampling?
That sounds like a great HQP dedicated server box to me. Stick it in a closet and let the fans cool. I think the speed would be fine. My BRIX i7 is a similar speed.
Depending on price you could look at a CUDA GPU instead of another processor, but I don’t think you’d need it. I would think this could upsample from Redbook to DSD 512, closed form, ASD7 and room convolution all day for years.
There’s a whole thread about upsampling with HQP in the HQP section, but very basically:
Nearly all DACs (Yggdrasil being a famous exception) convert a PCM stream, typically 44.1 kHz, to a sigma delta modulated one bit format before the actual DAC. Typically that involves a number of steps, all dependant on the computing power of the processor in the DAC, which is often far less powerful than a general purpose cpu. HQP enables users to perform those conversions using better algorthims and filters on the most powerful haedware they own, and send the DAC a DSD128 stream (say) which bypasses the internal conversions. Many people (including me) find it a more natural digital sound. The extent of the benefit depends on the DAC.