It's worth determining precisely what else you want this device to do as the terms get very confusing and muddled. The words streamer, server, network player etc all tend to get conflated into the same thing when in reality there are a bunch of actions that must be executed for music to be played.
The first thing to highlight is that the resolution of the file is unlikely to be a problem for the streamer/server; more likely it will be the DAC that comes up short and it will be with DSD files that this happens. 24/192 is all still PCM encoded so doesn't present a problem from a protocoal perspective. DSD is obviously an entirely different approch to encoding music and it is quite wonderful; the files I have in DSD a profoundly better than those encoded in PCM, even when all that's happened is that the PCM file has been upsampled to DSD. Obviously the whole point of DSD is that you capture the original recording in DSD, or, failing that, you go back to the master tapes and re-engineer those masters into DSD, otherwisre the full benefit is lost. You also need a USB connector to play DSD files as DSD; you can down sample from DSD to PCM and those downsampled files also still sound better than the alternative native PCM file.
Your music player can in theory upsample to DSD from PCM on the fly but for that you need a lot of horsepower and those servers can get very expensive. My own server (I know I bang on a lot about the LDMS MiniMax I have and am unapologetic about this because it really is just that good), cannot do this; it can retrieve, prepare and serve a DSD file to the DAC but it cannot upsample on the fly.
Second thing to realise is that playing music that you store locally (having bought it and downloaded it from Qobuz, Tidal or wherever; don't forget that you can buy music files from lots of place), provides a significant improvement in sound quality. Why this is the case is still unclear (to me), but noise, error correction etc will likely be the reason. So, your next question is whether you want your music player to have internal storage capacity or whether you will connect an external device to do this. External could be just a streaming source or it could also include a local storage facility, i.e. a SS drive or NAS device, it doesn't really make much difference which except SS devices are easier to just plug in, usually via a USB connection.
Either way the music player is basically doing one or all of the following:
- Server. The purpose of a server is to store files and send it on demand. A server can be on your computer itself where it resides on your HDD/SSD. Or it can be on a NAS on your network. Or it can be on the internet, like Tidal or Qobuz.
- Streamer. The purpose of a streamer is to provide a control point to request files from the server. The streamer might be on your computer (e.g. JRiver, Roon, Kodi, Foobar, Amarra, etc.), or on your tablet, or your phone. It might be built in to a specialized streamer device, e.g. Bluepoint, Cambridge Audio CXN, etc.
- Renderer. The renderer receives files from the streamer, or directly from the server. It decodes files into a format the DAC can understand. Some renderers have additional functions, such as DSP, convolution, VST, and so on.
In practise one box can do all of the above, being a combination of software and hardware. The biggest real world difference tends to be whether the box has a built in DAC or not. The Naim NDX2 is a network player because it provides an analogue output. Devices like the Innuos Pulsemini are called streamers because they have no server capability and devices that can do all three things cited above just tend to get called whatever the owner has in their head!
Hope this all helps.
