[estreeter]

Quote:

If you read Stereophile, John Atkinson has stated that he uses a Mac mini as his go to transport. I believe that best of show for RMAF was awarded to a computer audio room.
 
This is assuming you have the right playback software, SSD drive, and USB to SPDIF converter

 
There are very few high-end dedicated 2-channel shops left in Oz, but one of the few is in inner-city Brisbane. The owner has a netbook-based setup on display that I can guarantee would have the jaws of 99.9% of Head-Fiers on the floor - unfortunately, so would the pricetag. Sure, its all part of loosening the grip on our wallets, but its hardly 'real world audio', IMO. The Mac Mini solution strikes me as a good one, and I enjoy the sound I can get from my netbook, but there are so many factors involved in taking a desktop consumer PC and asking it to silently serve music alongside things like productivity apps etc - the dedicated solution really is the way to go for mine.
 
estreeter

 

[vert]

Sorry to hear about the dearth of dedicated 2-channel shops in Oz.
 
Australia is great place to live, btw.
 
I think a lot of people using the Mac mini are using it as a dedicated music server, and not for anything else. They even try to turn off everything else in OS X, like spotlight.
 
With the advent of the Ayrewave & Pure music software, SSD drives, and USB to SPDIF converters, the high end ultra expensive CD transports are looking like dinosaurs. As an audiophile, I'm thrilled that a properly configured Macbook or Mac mini can compete or outperform these transports.

 

[leeperry]

wow, this sounds like a bunch of clueless layman salesman bs...I love it
 
-LCD's emit much less EMF's than CRT's AFAIK
-indeed playing a video without Reclock is hopeless as the video and audio clocks are not synced...something a $30 standalone DVD player does.
-it's too easy to keep your PC "stock" and whine about priorities and so...you can set your media players to high priority, their audio rendering thread to realtime priority and set all the background system services to low priority(on single CPU cores)
-you can change the CPU scheduling, giving 6X more priority to high priority than to low: http://www.jhouseconsulting.com/2008/05/13/processor-scheduling-20
-tidy up your box and disable all the stuff that's not vital, you want to have less than 20 processes in the task manager at once.
-more and more audio gear starts using WM8804 to reclock the incoming data flow(either on the coax output or on the way to the DAC)
 
but surely, it's better to buy a Musiland w/ its crappy drivers

 

[Nihility]

im running a fiio e9/e7 dac combo out of my usb on my gaming rig right now, and (I have a manual fan nob on the back for the processor, and can software control the rest of the fans) as long as i turn everything down and dont run anything intensive, its pretty darn quiet. especially because im using closed cans. Now, i have new grados coming in tomorrow and it might cause a little issue, but I have no noise at all even with everything cranked on high (with nothing playing, of course!) but i guess i could attribute that to years of upgrading and only using top of the line brands (corsair, xfx, etc.)

 

[ramicio]

Every semiconductor performs binary calculations.  To say a computer isn't good to play audio on because it performs calculations is moronic.  A DAC semiconductor performs calculations.  Jitter is overblown.  You either have the signal or you don't.  A good sound card is going to do better with jitter than an external DAC because a PCI or PCIe bus is going to be tuned perfectly for signals getting there on exact timings, rather than going through a USB cable.  Why does someone have to play video with reclock?  My videos play back fine and I've never used it.

 

[xnor]

A: Computers can be perfect devices for both audio playback and recording.
 
Don't worry too much about it.

 

[Nihility]

Quote:

A: Computers can be perfect devices for both audio playback and recording.
 
Don't worry too much about it.

thumbs up XD

 

[MrGreen]

I want 5 minutes of my life back...

 

[danielghofrani]

you know what guys?! when It comes down to it, I just care about the sound. if it sounds good then it is good. 
for those of you who say "this is asynchronous, this is 192kHz, that is re-clocked, my setup is balanced, these cables are directional, 99.999% percent copper" I really like to do a blindfold test of a normal USB cable and a 600$ one and see if you can consistently tell the difference. 
 
it is true that I hear random EMI noises that come from my laptop (when I move my mouse over or just randomly), but the real acoustic fan noise is A LOT more annoying. 
 
there is a desktop computer at my parents house which I am going to try and setup over the holidays, maybe I will get a fan to go passive but the 0dB power supplies are like 179$ each and I can't afford them right now.
 
Also one thing to note is: as a musician I believe the music is a lot more important than the setup. for example if you play Arnold Schoenberg with a 20000$ setup, I will still like Bach better on my laptop. In head-fi we tend to talk a lot about the coloring of sounds by headphone amps and sound signature of headphones, we never talk about an instrumentalists embouchure , mouthpiece, reed , instrument, mallets, tips of mallets, the skin used on the percussion instrument, the strings used on violins, the felt used on piano hammers, etc. 
 
trust me the difference that makes is more pronounced. I hope there are at least some of you who can relate to me.

 

[Soymilk]

people don't talk about that because they're going to listen to the same stuff they like on whatever setup they have. it's not like (using your example) if you have a $20000 setup you are no longer capable of listening to Bach and you have to listen to something else you don't like as much. you'll still listen to Bach if that's what you like, and it'll perform better than your laptop.

 

[ChipnDalebowl]

The circuitry of audio is basically all the same...chips aren't going to reproduce 1's and 0's differently than any other chip (unless you got some DSPs working).  Computers work just as good as any dedicated stereo playing a digital source (ie CD).  Its the speakers or headphones that make a larger difference than what actually turns 1's and 0's into analog signals.

 

[Sonic Atrocity]

Wouldn't a DAC just solve any possible problem when using a computer as the source? Isn't the the point of a DAC? Maybe I am missing something here. *shrugs*

 

[danielghofrani]

Wouldn't a DAC just solve any possible problem when using a computer as the source? Isn't the the point of a DAC? Maybe I am missing something here. *shrugs*

 

 

[weibby]

the biggest problem now is not the hardware, its the software.

 

[xnor]

Quote:

the biggest problem now is not the hardware, its the software.

Care to explain your reasoning for this statement?