Thank you all, and of course you Peter for having posted. I will have no issues with a paid version, I just like to practice first with the GUI mind you. I wonder if in blind listening tests the differences between using bit-perfect output from JRiver or using US output from XXHE are actually detectable? It seems some good ears feel that way and I look forward to trying my ears out. Essentially I have read that it is good for sound quality to upsample in software before the NOS dac. That is one of the reasons I feel XXHE may sound better for me than JRiver as I think the upsampling engine used in XXHE is superior.

Nice. Thanks for the welcome. I think it is fun to know what gear people use; I often learn about good, but obscure pieces that way. Not sure if we aren't supposed to say where we are from (I doubt that restriction is in effect here), but I especially like to know where people are from, I just find it interesting. I am in Ottawa the capital city of Canada.

Thanks for the reply AlainGR, I really appreciate a responsive community! On head-fi where I am active like you I have over 700 posts; so weird to be the newbie. I won't be pushing my system as best I know. I will of course be using DSP, but my goal is to stay as close to bit-perfect while performing the requisite upsampling/digital filtering needed to overcome the rolled off approach of a NOS dac. For the record I love my Schiit Gungnir, I am simply intrigued by the notion that with a little software mojo my system might sound even better.

I use a NAD M3 integrated and have a pair of wonderful (to my ears) Neat Motive 1 speakers supported by two Rel T-Zero subs. I value neutrality and accuracy, but a little warmth in sound doesn't scare me much either. I am also a headphone user with a soon to arrive HiFi Man HE560 driven by a Schiit Asgard 2 headphone amplifier. That isn't all meant as "gear dropping", just trying to add a little more information to my "sonic signature" Cheers.

First, I hope to spend some time around here. I am a fairly active member over at head-fi which is how I learned about XXHighEnd. So before even bothering with trying the demo I need some opinions.

I currently run JRiver 18 and I find the sound quality to be quite high so the potential that XXHE can improve on this is very exciting. Why do I want to use XXHE? In a nutshell I have a decent NOS dac, Schiit Gungnir. I prefer the NOS sound as far as I can tell as I sold my Audiolab 8200CD which was an OS dac player. I have gone all computer audio, lossless files only. I have read that using upsampling on the computer before the dac mitigates some of the issues associated with the NOS approach. To that effect, I want to use the best upsampling filters available, and it sounds like XXHE provides that.

So, my computer is a basic Dell (retired government computer) about 5 years old and has only an Intel Core2 Duo and the memory is only about 2 GB. I can bump up the RAM no problem, but I really don't intend to purchase a new computer as JRiver runs without a hitch on the machine so my belief is that if in order to provide the upsampling that I hope to try requires me to spend another $1000 in hardware that is a deal breaker. So can I use my basic (Win 7) Dell with XXHE and still realize a performance improvement over JRiver?

For what it is worth, next year I intend to build a much more powerful music server, but as the one I have now works well, my hope is to get through another year as is. Thank you in advance for your thoughts. Cheers.