I've got a ModWright Oppo BDP-105 (tube outputs on the 2ch audio). Due to life happening, it's been sitting in a box for a bit more than two years. I am finally going to get it setup. The Oppo will feed a Parasound P7 preamp which will, in turn, feed an ADCOM 5ch amp - at the moment I'm only using 2 or maybe 2.1 channels - that's not likely to change anytime soon unless I move everything to a different room.
So, I have some (a few hundred) DSD tracks, and the rest are FLAC on a USB drive. Currently, it's connected via a piece of crap Mac Mini. How they made an i7 run that slowly, I'll never know. It's going away. I can't take it anymore. I'll hook up my old gaming machine and run MC on that and probably store the files on a 2T SSD.
The PC will connect via USB to the OPPO DAC input. Then I'll run the 2ch audio out to one of the audio inputs on the P 7 - and I'll run the 7.1 from the Oppo to the 7.1 on the P 7 for Blueray/Streaming Video.
What I'm confused about is how to set up MC so that it feeds the highest quality files to the Oppo (DAC) Which should handle up to DSD 128. How do I know if Media Center is feeding the DSD to the DAC - and should I let MC handle any upconversions or should I feed what I've got (mostly CD rips) to the DAC and let it do what it wants?