is having the media server away from the listening room really necessary, if we are using completely silent builds tailor-made to be in the listening room (such as the CAPS machines mentioned)?
Electromagnetic and radio-frequency interference are the kind of “noise” I’m talking about, not the audible kind.
We worked with Meridian for many years on these issues when building out the Sooloos product line, since the original Sooloos devices were fanless PCs in pretty boxes. They were fairly well optimized for audio performance, insofar as that was possible in 2007, and many people said that they sounded very good. When we got there, the Meridian guys looked at us funny–to them, it was a ridiculous notion that you could make good audio right next to a computer, and it was clear to them that our products sounded like garbage. They were just working to a different standard than we were when it came to audio.
As soon as we began working on the ID40/MS200 products (essentially network streaming bridges for Meridian speakers), it was clear that they blew everything we’d done before away. Night and day.
Those guys are experts in making audio hardware, and really smart guys, and everything they did in in defining that architecture led to big strides in SQ for the products. I’m the wrong kind of engineer to give you an expert level analysis of the hows and whys, but I have seen no reason to doubt what the experts up at Meridian HQ taught us over the years.