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Advice on best upgrade path for a Mac Mini setup

Hi all,

My beloved PWT transport was shipped out for service last week, so in the mean time I decided to experiment with the Mac Mini which usually resides in my 2nd system. It was no surprise that it doesn't even come close to the PWT, but it sounds OK, and now i'm curious as of what I can achieve with it without spending another $2K.

It's a stock Mac Mini about 2 years old with an SSD drive.
I'm using it to stream TIDAL Hi-Fi.
I have it hooked up to a Schiit Wyrd USB re-generator via a Pangea silver USB 2 cable, which in turn is feeding my DSD via a WireWorld Starlight 7 USB 2 cable.
My thinking was that the Mac-to-Schiit path will be less critical in terms of cables, as it gets regenerated anyway, but I'm open to listen and learn...
That "Wyrd Schiit" re-generator did make quite a noticeable positive impact when I hooked it up in my 2nd system.

My question is - what will be the best bang-for-the-buck upgrades? 

I guess the switching power supply is a weak link so I looked at Mojo Audio stuff and those prices seem unreasonable - they want more for their power supply than what I paid for my PWT (including its superb power supply).
Any other recommended power supply upgrade kits?
I'm good with DIY and can probably do the upgrade myself.

Perhaps go with much better cables? Better isolation? Better re-generator?
What did you guys try that proved to really do the "magic" for similar setups?
Perhaps it is a 'losing battle' and it will never sound nearly as good as my PWT without spending $2K in upgrades?

Thanks for your advice!

Ami

128x128ami
ghosthouse's avatar
ghosthouse
4,307 posts
 
Tom -  BTW-read you post about sonics during the Sunday service at the old Baptist church.  Well written.  Felt like I had been there.  

Thanks for your input.  The Apple Mac Mini is something I have been thinking about too.  Thought the Aries Mini might be cheaper.  Did not know there was a remote app for the Mac Mini.  I was thinking wireless mouse and keyboard needed to do initial set up.  Would screenshare allow that to be done from my Macbook?    

There are pluses for staying with Apple besides familiarity.  BitPerfect is one of them....low cost music playback software that improves over iTunes alone.  Only $10 but it does seem to make things sound better.  AND with a Mac Mini I'd be able to watch YouTube music videos on the flatscreen with sound into the main system.  

The upside to the Aries is it's dedicated and would save me a few bucks on the mouse and keyboard since I could control from an iPhone.  Downside is no BitPerfect and no YouTube.  

The good news right now is I can sit tight and do nothing for a while.  Of course, prices always seem to rise over time.  Thanks again for the input.


ghosthouse's avatar
ghosthouse
4,307 posts
 
Hi @jond. Thanks.  I had read that and did understand it could do ALAC. My uncertainty was about whether it could read those files from a powered, external Western Digital hard drive. Wasn’t sure I could assume that simply from your NAS experience.
dbtom2
382 posts
 
@ghosthouse

On your iPhone go to appstore and download free Apple iTunes remote app.

Set up iTunes for remote (in preferences) and voila, you can control your Itunes on macbook from your phone.

Yes you can use screenshare to control macmini but its nice to have a keyboard, mouse and monitor handy to set it up first. If your mini will be close to tv anyway, then there you go. (I surf on the big screen all the time. Great for youtube and Tidal videos too.)

Let me add that the MacMini is a very quiet machine. I've only made the fan run a few times, usually when using HQPlayer to upsample to DSD. Even then, it doesn't occur each time. 

jond's avatar
jond
5,817 posts
 
@ghosthouse yes it decodes all those files from a NAS.
rbstehno
1,445 posts
 
I had a really nice setup using my Mac mini with 16G of ram and using a 5TB NAS 100' away for my disk so you would not get any noise from the HDD's. I have used a few different programs to play my ripped music and I liked the sound of Audirvana 2.x the best without using iTunes in the background. I have a reclocker and the audioquest diamond USB cable feeding into my DAC and the MAC was optimized by turning off spotlight and time machine. This setup sounded better than my $3000 classe CD player. 6 months ago, I did some testing and ended up purchasing the Auralic Aries music player/streamer. What an improvement in sound and in the playback software to control what I'm playing. 
The Aries still needs some type of disk to hold all of your ripped music. So what I did was to take my Mac mini and turn it into an OSX server with 16TB of disk attached to it (10TB in a raid 1 configuration that I use for my music) and I installed minimserver that allows the Aries to connect. The Mac OS X server allows me to use this server for many other things besides surfacing music, it's a little work horse now.
The Aries also gives you streaming capabilities tidal and others and gives you access to 10,000 web radio stations in all genres. 
The Aries comes with the DS Lightning software for your iPad that you use to configure the Aries and also control what you want to listen to. Very nice! But I was playing around and started to use the Lumin iPad software to control the Aries and I think it actually sounds better than using the DS Lightning software. A new release of the DS software was just released and it promise to sound better than the prior release.
so what I'm trying to say is to look outside of using your Mac mini as a music server and look at products like the Auralic. IMO, don't get sucked into the players that contain internal hard disks, use your Mac mini OS X server to house all your hard disks and then take advantage of this server for all the other things it can do.
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