Hi Pete. I was trying to be brief but happy to clarify. Today i have vivaldi transport and paganini 3 box stack. I use a “home built” dedicated server that is attached directly to my pag upsampler via usb i access the files via plex. This “server” is synched to my pag clock currently I use this network function almost exclusively for background music for parties (not through my main amps and speakers but via cat 5 and firestick or smart tv to localized areas of my home) and use the plex and streaming function primarily for bringing music, tv and video to my ipad or phone when on road trips and traveling. It is almost never used through the main system but it is a nice addition. My processor has a strong dac built in but i prefer to send the data through the pag stack when i do listen to the server in the listening room and it performs nicely. My listening is really 99% in a dedicated listening room and when digital (75%) is through the pag dac, clock and current vivaldi transport playing cds and sacds - (25%) analog. I have acquired a vivaldi dac and clock and will replace the pag stack in the next few days. My decision thinking at this point is whether i leave the pag upsampler in the setup to improve the server fed music to the main setup until such time that i purchase an upsampler planned for sometime over the next year, bypass getting a new upsampler altogether and run the server through my processor dac only and what dcs functionality and improvements am i giving up through this method. I never plan to pay for online streaming and have a massive digital collection on cd,sacd and to a lesser extent in lossless server content Thats long. I hope that it is somewhat clear. Thx
Thanks for the response. Unfortunately it leaves me just as confused albeit in a slightly different way 
.
Anyway you are not really asking how best to use your network option as it is unimportant to you and is only used for background music at parties. So you may as well keep the Paganini.
As for your future plans if network audio remains a minor and less important pursuit and if you will never be interested in streaming services etc, then I would find the addition of Vivaldi Upsampler more difficult to justify financially. If course Vivaldi transport will upsample your CDs should such a thing appeal to you.
Thank you. That is exactly what i was thinking. The pag upsampler seems adequate to get me by for very limited use for now. I do like the idea of using ipad for controls on the vivaldi setup. Will mosaic connect to the dac and connected transport also providing metadata or is a vivaldi upsampler required for this function. Thanks a lot. Barry
No as there is no network connection to Vivaldi DAC. Your network connection will continue to be via the USB connection on Paganini UPS. This is, however, more limited in respect of the formats and resolutions it will handle compared to the USB input on Pag Clock 2 or, of course, Vivaldi UPS or, preferably for optimum sound quality , via the network input on the latter. For clarification Mosaic will not provide any metadata relating to discs played on your transport. I am not even sure whether it has transport controls. It will display metadata for networked files from a server but only if the metadata has been stored with the file.
Mosaic is a two part device. A control app which runs on, say, an i-pad or Android phone and a hardware component which, for Vivaldi, is part of Vivaldi Upsampler. So, in a Vivaldi system you need Vivaldi UPS to use Mosaic.
Perfect. Thank you. I was hoping it could pull metadata back from the transport but obviously that was a dream. Is anyone aware of a work around to capture cd metadata on the network… ie be able to see what is playing image and track info on a screen or ipad somewhat like a car display
I have been asked by the local high end dealer why i dont go with a service to make the server more friendly. When i show them the plex interface to my network (in their showroom) on my phone they are shocked. I can bluetooth it to the car system and it plays and feeds metadata to the car. Its not perfect but really very decent and i can control the metadata which is cool. It downloads metadata automatically as needed from the net but it extracts the metadata from discs as burned and i can independently alter or compliment the metadata as well on the server through simple edit commands. Thanks again for you help. Barry
You can add metadata to your local files if you are ripping CDs to your NAS. Using something like dbpoweramp with its related option PerfectTunes will automatically provide album title, artist,cover art and track information. It does this by searching up to 4 databases and presents the results from each for you to choose or amend. I have used it for years to rip thousands of albums. Its accuracy has improved year by year as it gathers more data from users.However this is a way of capturing the information to store it. Am I right in thinking that instead you are wondering if there is something that will do this on the fly as you play a track? if not:
You might be able to add the metadata to existing files if dbpoweramp can recognise them. However I am just speculating as I have never attempted this.
Thanks again Pete. Capturing the metadata and all photos as well as bios on artists is a breeze for the NAS with few exceptions but I am going to check out dbpoweramp. Never to late to see something better. Yes I was thinking on the fly from my on my ipad or hard connected screen as I play a cd on the vivaldi. I typically have the liner notes available from the media that I am playing, but not always and some of my playing occurs after 11p at night and in the dark. If the vivaldi transport or dac fed backwards into the net allowing me to capture the metadata of a hard cd as it plays would be very convenient. Sorry to tax your thinking with my incomplete thoughts
thanks again
Did not know that Rossini does not allow to disable upsampling. Just ordered Rossini Dac and Rossini Transport yesterday.
Regards,
Sourav
Yet another stupid question:
I thought that this was precisely what upsampling does. Interpolating bits in between the initial 44.1kHz sample rate (in the case if redbook) and adding them to the playback stream. Hence the higher resolution output. Am I wrong?
Hi,
Upsampling doesn’t add anything in the way of original audio that wasn’t recorded back into what you are listening to … it can’t do that as that information simply isn’t there, but one of the things it does do is effectively move the sampling frequency of the audio file being played further up and away from the audio band so that enables the use of much gentler (and less compromising) audio filters in the reproduction chain after the DAC.
BR
Phil
Thank you @Phil.
I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I have misunderstood this all these years. I thought upsampling enabled the interpolation and playback of data points that were not in the original recording, and that the quality of the algorithms used in the upsampling would therefore impact the amount and accuracy of information “added back” and played.
From your explanation and further research I understand that is not the case.
One should never be sorry or embarrassed for asking questions and thinking about the answers … that’s the best thing in the world!
If you want a bit more info have a read of these…
…James has been a busy bee over the last three years writing up notes on what we do and why which makes my life much easier (Thanks James! 
). 
Phil
Thank you for your gracious reply @Phil. Now that I know I have been wrong about how upsampling works, I’d like to ask (yet another) stupid question which relates to the DSP. I thought–again, incorrectly–that upsampling to a higher frequency: (a) analyzed the input stream; (b) used DSP to calculate datapoints that were likely present in the original analogue, but lost in the redbook sample; and (c) inserted those datapoints back into the playback stream that was eventually passed to the amp. This would mean that the output stream has more data than the original input stream, as depicted below, with the red dots representing the new, calculated datapoints.
Recognizing that this is not how it works, why is this not a good approach/feasible? Is it because the input datastream is simply too complex to calculate/interpolate what was missing? Thank you.
Hi,
In the actual implementation there is a huge amount of maths applied to Upsampling but at a basic / simplistic level that’s exactly what it does - it adds in additional samples to fill in the gaps between the original samples using the existing sample data to “work out” what the waveform is doing.
This Upsampling then lifts the apparent sampling frequency which allows the use of much gentler and hence much less harmful (in audio terms) filters in the digital-to-analogue conversion process.
What upsampling can’t do though is add back in audio information that simply wasn’t captured in the original recording.
Revisting my Sep’21 post above 
Which begs the question, exactly how does dCS’ Upsampling interpolation work? I don’t think I’ve ever seen any technical explanation
I think the key point here is that although more data comes out than went in, it’s all guessed based on the input data. This is not the same as starting with a higher sampling rate, but presumably the different algoritms attempt to get as close as they can, with different tradeoffs.
As Phil pointed out, the primary purpose of this isn’t to try to get more data from the original samples, but to allow the use of less detrimental filtering in the next step of conversion.
It’s more that it is fundamentally not something we should try to do in the first place.
When Upsampling / interpolation is done correctly, the original musical signal should actually remain unchanged. If a recording was only done at 44.1k, that’s all the information we’re going to correctly get out of it - anything else is basically guaranteed to be incorrect.
Upsampling doesn’t try to work out what samples would have been there if the ADC had been running at a higher rate in the studio as frankly that would be guesswork given how complex and quasi-random actual musical signals are.
The purpose of Upsampling it is that it allows you to employ different filtering trade-offs so that we:
- Don’t have a brick wall analogue filter at 22.05kHz (bad idea)
…and…
- Don’t have loads of Nyquist images at >22.05kHz (also a bad idea)
Upsampling cannot correctly recover more information than is actually in the original signal, and if a product was to try and guess what samples should be in there, it would be changing the original musical signal based on estimated samples we aren’t sure were even correct in the first place. If the Upsampling / interpolation is carried out correctly, the original signal should actually be unchanged while allowing us to employ more appropriate filtering than would otherwise be possible.
I’m afraid the specifics of how we do it are going to fall under the ‘dCS Secret Sauce’ category, which would be why there isn’t a comprehensive explanation…
Absolutely …
Thank you again Phil.
So Phil @Phil , given that upsampling’s goal is to enable applications of multiple filters by pushing the harmful artifacts resulted out of filtering high above audible range and not creating large number of Nyquist images , the same should be applicable for high resolution recordings too (256 did, 512 dsd, 768pcm). Is that correct understanding ?
Essentially yes, the higher the sample rate then the further outside the accepted human audio range the filtering can be …