Pieterh wrote:you have any clue why a recent and expensive audiostreamer by sound galleries music server (SGM) uses a high grade clock upgrade on their mobo (asus z170m-plus). they use their streamer also to upsample to e.g. dsd 512 with HQPlayer.
Just because someone makes such a device and use it as a selling point doesn't necessarily make real sense. There are plenty of products out there that are designed based on flawed reasoning and hyped up to make you spend more money.
You will be running a multi-tasking operating system that schedules processes/threads in and out, read and write to memory and I/O devices, and handles interrupts which will cause any playing digital audio stream to be stopped and started continuously. A low jitter clock for the CPU won't do anything to help this. Only hardware buffering would alleviate data overrun and underrun conditions. This is the nature of things, and is why an external asynchronous USB DAC is superior than an adaptive USB DAC. The former controls the flow of data from the host to reduce jitter. Of course, having a low-jitter clock for the DAC itself is important.