Hi quietdragon,
I will get you an engineering answer but here is a brief description for you of where we are going - its part of the new literature I am working on:
BRYSTON BDP-1:
The Bryston BDP-1 is designed to interface between your ‘music library’ and a high quality DAC (Bryston BDA-1). The BDP-1 Digital Player has no display (GUI), no hard drive, and no CD drawer or Ripper, and no Wireless Streaming. It runs a very stripped down version of the operating system Linux, with just what is necessary to "play" the files. It has no internal storage. It boots from flash with a read only file system. The box has no moving parts and is silent. It does not have a big touch screen with fancy graphics, it doesn't rip content, manage or clean up your metadata or synchronize with your summer home. Its focused on playing high res files and will support 16 bit and 24 bit files with the following sample rates: 44.1KHz, 48KHz, 88.2KHz, 96KHz, 176.4KHz & 192KHz
james
While the final product remains to be seen, based on the above I would say you are on the right track, this is exactly what is missing on the market, take a wav file from a storage of your choice, create digital signal of low jitter and send it to digital input on standalone DAC of your choice, supporting higher resolution formats (word length and sampling frequency).
The execution will determine how good it is in the end, potentially it could be the device that finally brings performance of computer based audio to top tier.
