A dedicated streaming music server has but one overriding purpose: to enable the discovery and delivery of digitally encoded music— and then get out of the way. Ideally, it performs like the best of servants, keeping everything in order, noting items worthy of attention, doing exactly as its master wishes, and then bowing out without drawing attention to itself.
For probably the majority of music-lovers, an all-purpose computer, used for pretty much everything except washing dishes, serves as their music server. Some use a dedicated computer reserved solely for music playback.
Typical computers, though—dedicated or not—aren’t optimized for music playback; because they run all sorts of processes irrelevant to audio, and, because noise usually doesn’t affect nonmusical functions, they are saddled with noise—not the directly audible kind, but the kind that pollutes audio signals and makes them sound worse, in a variety of ways. The noise comes not just from apps working in the background—antivirus software, word processors, and a host of nondefeatable, automatically updating programs—but also from ports and pathways designed for multiple functions and not engineered to keep polluting EMI away from precious music signals.
Enter the dedicated high-end audio server, a class that includes the Innuos Statement music server/streamer/ripper ($13,750 and up), the flagship server from a Portuguese company that makes nothing but. Innuos was founded in 2013 by software engineers Nuno Vitorino and Amelia Santos, who met in 1994 as university students and, later, got married. Seeds for the company were planted in 2009, when Vitorino assembled a music server in his garage, offered it on eBay, and sold 200 units in six months.
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