[AudioGal]

Amazing. One question, did you mean two 4TB external hard drives?

Correct - TB, not GB. Sigh. Still not used to thinking in terms of terabytes of disk storage. Gonna go back and fix that.

 

[EELawson]

OK. I am ready for that Transport now. Thank you.

 

[Ripper2860]

Steering back to audio from BBQ, I've been enjoying hearing about which streaming software and supporting hardware people are using. Figured it was my turn to share. While the description below may sound like a lot of work, it's something I enjoy doing. Yeah, I know, I'm weird. In the end it's all about furthering my enjoyment of the music I love listening to. The gear's cool and all, but it's the music that matters. If that invalidates my audiophile membership card, so be it.

Quick detour - One thing I've noticed as I've improved my main headphone setup (currently a Modi MB -> Loki -> Mjolnir 2 -> DC Ether C) is that my enjoyment of my daily driver rig while at work is an LG V30 phone -> Etymotic ER4XR, has increased. No, the daily driver rig hasn't magically gotten better. Just that the discovery of new things in music I'm familiar with on the home rig have affected the way I'm listening to the daily driver rig. Kind of like an automatic upgrade in between the ears. Go figure.

Current digital music concoction:
For the endpoint I've been using the long discontinued Slim Devices Squeezebox, connected via S/PDIF to a Modi Multibit DAC. The user interface is a remote control for the player. Which I consider to be a plus - the transport controls are always available on the remote without needing to have a web browser window pointing to the server to start/stop/pause/skip the music. "Pause" and "Play" being the most used buttons. Love the display, it fits in nicely with the pile of Schiit hardware. HOWEVER... Digging through the library for a specific tune or starting up a stream on Pandora sucks using the remote and is best done using a web browser on whatever is convenient - phone, tablet, laptop, etc. Best of both worlds.

My server is very DIY though. Currently I have an installation of the moOde distribution Linux running on a Raspberry Pi 4, with the Logitech Media Server installed on top of that. Two 4Tbyte external hard drives are connected via USB 3.0 to the R-Pi, running in a quasi mirrored set up - only one drive stays mounted. When the library is updated, a shell script catches that the update occurred, mounts the second drive and runs rsync against the library. Once the second drive matches the first, it's spun down and unmounted again. The Pi is configured to boot from a small Linux partition on the USB drives, there's no microSD card in the Pi. System logs are mounted remotely to another R-Pi that has an SSD as its system drive which allows me to spin down the hard drives when idle. The rest of the space on the drives is used for storing music. LMS has plugins that support the streaming services I have accounts with - Spotify, Pandora, Qobuz which all integrate into a single presentation of the complete collection.

Music organization and meta data - The music files are stored as RIFF WAV files, organized in a tree - file name is track number & song title, each album is a subdirectory (folder) holding the relevant files, artist folder holds all the albums by that artist. All of this is in Windows style format since I started ripping CDs using Media Monkey on a Windows machine. Nearly complete on moving the ripping process to the R-Pi with a pair of CD drives so that I can rip more than one disk at a time and move the user interface for the ripping process from a GUI to a command line style I/F.

Once I've finished getting enough of my CDs ripped, I'll start on the auto-updating player for the car. Will be yet another R-Pi4 with a decent size SSD attached and configured to appear as a music player to the USB interface in the car infotainment system. I've no desire for anything better sounding than the factory system in my car. Vermont roads aren't known for being a smooth ride on a good day and Subarus aren't know for having the quietest cabins.

Edited after posting to correct size of disk drives. Terabytes not Gigabytes. Sigh. Still not used to thinking in terabytes of storage. Thanks to @RickB for pointing out the mistake!

 

[Timster]

Seeking some help from all my learned friends.

My father has severe industrial hearing damage from his many years working in large scale printing factories. Essentially he has -70db around the 1.5-4khz region, right where most voices are prominent.

I am trying to help him get better results from his phone calls via a combination of headphones that work with his hearing aids (he already has some Grado 325s and he is comfortable with these) an amplifier, in this case the Oppo HA-2 and what I need help with - a passive high pass filter. There are on-line calculators, but I'm not really sure that the results from these will produce what I need... hence the ask for help.

So I want to know a circuit to high pass ~2khz and up, and with approx 12-18db/octave roll-off for sub-2k. I want to be able put this in a little plastic box that goes in-line from the phone to the headphone amp. Hoping that someone can come up with a simple circuit. Am then hoping that this will add to the clarity for him, and reduce the need to amplify so much.

What would be good is a parametric EQ head-amp combo with at least 24db boost/cut, but have not found one yet. Any ideas on that?

Interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

EDIT : Can be mono too, as only needed for phone calls

 

[Derrick Swart]

Seeking some help from all my learned friends.

My father has severe industrial hearing damage from his many years working in large scale printing factories. Essentially he has -70db around the 1.5-4khz region, right where most voices are prominent.

I am trying to help him get better results from his phone calls via a combination of headphones that work with his hearing aids (he already has some Grado 325s and he is comfortable with these) an amplifier, in this case the Oppo HA-2 and what I need help with - a passive high pass filter. There are on-line calculators, but I'm not really sure that the results from these will produce what I need... hence the ask for help.

So I want to know a circuit to high pass ~2khz and up, and with approx 12-18db/octave roll-off for sub-2k. I want to be able put this in a little plastic box that goes in-line from the phone to the headphone amp. Hoping that someone can come up with a simple circuit. Am then hoping that this will add to the clarity for him, and reduce the need to amplify so much.

What would be good is a parametric EQ head-amp combo with at least 24db boost/cut, but have not found one yet. Any ideas on that?

Interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

miniDSP? Didn’t/don’t they sell a portable amp with EQ? Probably not up to 24dB though ...

 

[Timster]

miniDSP? Didn’t/don’t they sell a portable amp with EQ? Probably not up to 24dB though ...

Thanks for the input. If, and that's a big if, we go down the active path, it needs to be simple, set and forget. I'm the tech support for this, and am not close by. I will look at miniDSP though, see what they have

EDIT : The miniDSP IL-DSP looks interesting, as does their HA-DSP. More investigation required. Thanks!

 

[wout31]

No tinkering needed with Raspberry Pi. There are companies that assemble everything for you including the software.
Complete pack for under € 250,00 In a neat box with a power switch on the front

Audiophonics France

 

[ScubaMan2017]

That looks to be a good alternative to the Bluesound Node 2i and $100 cheaper as a bonus.

ELAC Discovery's Canadian MRSP made my eyebrows shoot up (first thing this morning [I need more coffee apparently]). I'll stick with the poor man's media server, a chromebook or iPad (with the appropriate dongle).

 

[A Jedi]

Seeking some help from all my learned friends.

My father has severe industrial hearing damage from his many years working in large scale printing factories. Essentially he has -70db around the 1.5-4khz region, right where most voices are prominent.

I am trying to help him get better results from his phone calls via a combination of headphones that work with his hearing aids (he already has some Grado 325s and he is comfortable with these) an amplifier, in this case the Oppo HA-2 and what I need help with - a passive high pass filter. There are on-line calculators, but I'm not really sure that the results from these will produce what I need... hence the ask for help.

So I want to know a circuit to high pass ~2khz and up, and with approx 12-18db/octave roll-off for sub-2k. I want to be able put this in a little plastic box that goes in-line from the phone to the headphone amp. Hoping that someone can come up with a simple circuit. Am then hoping that this will add to the clarity for him, and reduce the need to amplify so much.

What would be good is a parametric EQ head-amp combo with at least 24db boost/cut, but have not found one yet. Any ideas on that?

Interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

EDIT : Can be mono too, as only needed for phone calls

For really simple passive stuff look here https://www.hlabs.com/products/crossovers/

 

[Derrick Swart]

No tinkering needed with Raspberry Pi. There are companies that assemble everything for you including the software.
Complete pack for under € 250,00 In a neat box with a power switch on the front

Audiophonics France

good price!

 

[bochawa]

I went with the Allo Digione Player in the acrylic case for a no tinkering RPi experience. It came with Volumio, which was okay, but recently I switched to MoodeAudio software and I like it much better.

 

[quimbo]

I went with the Allo USBridge Sig, I also ordered Volumio which was prudent as there is a plugin for SubSonic so it was simple to get to my music since I have a subsonic license I purchased many years ago. It supports most of the major streaming services except Amazon. I don't subscribe to any services so cannot speak to how those work. There is an issue with the PodCast plugin

I connect the Allo to a BiFrost 1 using USB. (I connect my Cowan Plenue via CoAx and a Shanling CD Transport via Optical), giving ,me total flexibility on my home desktop setup where i spend a good 10 to 15 hours a day during the week

 

[judson_w]

(snip)

My server is very DIY though. Currently I have an installation of the moOde distribution Linux running on a Raspberry Pi 4, with the Logitech Media Server installed on top of that. Two 4Tbyte external hard drives are connected via USB 3.0 to the R-Pi, running in a quasi mirrored set up - only one drive stays mounted. When the library is updated, a shell script catches that the update occurred, mounts the second drive and runs rsync against the library. Once the second drive matches the first, it's spun down and unmounted again. The Pi is configured to boot from a small Linux partition on the USB drives, there's no microSD card in the Pi. System logs are mounted remotely to another R-Pi that has an SSD as its system drive which allows me to spin down the hard drives when idle. The rest of the space on the drives is used for storing music. LMS has plugins that support the streaming services I have accounts with - Spotify, Pandora, Qobuz which all integrate into a single presentation of the complete collection.

(/snip)

That dual drive set up is very nice. Much nicer than the manual process I have been doing. I will have to look into that process.

 

[audio philestine]

I want to see a review where suddenly crap is coming up. You know, where the reviewer is honest and fair but comes to the conclusion the product is really bad. Can’t remember the last one I saw or read...

https://www.stereophile.com/content/ultrasone-edition-10

EDIT: add link to written review

 

[Ripper2860]

Tyll taking one for the team. Thanks, Tyll!