The W20 has no integral DAC and no native CD ripping capability, and offers no metadata editing. The W20 is designed to do one thing and do it well: store music, allow you to access that music, and then present the highest possible quality digital-output signal to your DAC. As you’ll see, the company has gone to extraordinary lengths in the pursuit of better sound. Rather, every aspect of the W20’s design is aimed solely at delivering state-of-the-art sound quality. Nothing in the W20 is based on stock computer subsystems. That’s what the Korean firm Aurender has done in creating the flagship W20 reviewed here. This approach obviously requires a much greater investment of time and money, as well as considerable technical expertise. Although these are steps in the right direction, creating the state of the art in music servers requires designing and building an entire computer from a blank sheet of paper. Most turnkey-server manufacturers, however, build their systems around a stock commodity-grade computer-motherboard to which they add custom digital outputs with more precise clocking, improved power supplies, and some measure of electrical isolation between the motherboard and the audio output.

Building a server from the ground up allows the designer to incorporate techniques that optimize sonic performance-techniques that are unavailable in general-purpose computers. Our reviewer Steven Stone once wrote, only half jokingly, that DIY servers are for the ultra-geeky and turnkey servers are for the ultra-rich.īut there’s another reason beyond convenience to buy a turnkey music server: sound quality. If you want instant access to thousands of albums with a couple of finger taps, but abhor the thought of drilling down through multiple sub-menus of arcane software settings, a turnkey server is for you. But the raison d’être of “turnkey” music servers is to provide listeners with the benefits of file-based music without the hassles of computers.

Do-it-yourself servers based on a Mac or Windows PC make no attempt to hide this fact from their users. As I describe in this issue’s From The Editor, beneath every music server’s audio-component-like exterior lurks a computer.

Jriver music server