New Streamer setup advice

[AudioFreak]

Hi guys,

 

My first post and glad to be part of the community. Been lurking here a while now. Some advice would be great.

 

Currently I use a vortexbox appliance to serve music and also the vb mpd player connected via USB to my audiolab mdac.

 

It's all good but I kind of feel that the server and player should be separate boxes based on the assumption that the less the player has to do the better for sound quality?

 

so I was contemplating one of the following:

 

1) mini itx based player - Linux based using mpd

2) raspberry pi using volumio, but concerned by the USB/Ethernet shared bus

3) beaglebone black with volumio which gets around the rpi bus issue but I understand the clock cannot natively handle 44.1kbps since it works in multiples of 48kbps only

 

Questions

1) am I wasting my time? Is my vb combined server/player going to be as good as separating the functions into different boxes?

2) is the bbb considered a better option than rpi?

3) most of my music collection is 44.1kbps (cd rips) so I expect that the bbb would upsample to 48k and thus present a non bit perfect stream? But if I'm outputting to an async USB dac, is this relevant?

 

 

Thanks

 

Edit

Should have posted this under 'music servers'... Sorry