Mini Mac as audio server?

No worries Gunbei, though I believe this is a new feature in Panther (10.3). Target Disk Mode is still nothing to sniff at. Just nice to escape a shutdown.

I only wish iTunes did Shorten/FLAC playback, mainly for all these EasyTree shows. I've read mutterings about not all lossless compression schemes being equal in playback: Apple's Lossless sounding worse than FLAC, etc. Anyone have a story on this that's more than anecdotal?

Any such thing as an ATX case built just to house FireWire drives? $80 per external FW case is absurd.

Golix, are you using Apogee gear? Any reviews?

Fishpatrol--I've never seen data rates given as megabytes per second; I did mean megabits per second, but I'm guessing that if you are reading some log, its probably also megabits per second.

Gunbei--I would love it if keeping my ethernet cables straight was as simple as color coding... I've got normal ethernet cables with gray jackets and crossover cables with blue. No standard there, unfortunately.

802.11b = MAX of 10 mbps. 802.11a/g = MAX of 54 mbps. The maximums are pretty difficult to obtain in real life. Airport is 11b, AE is 11g. I recall that the Audiotron community indicated there were problems (stutters, etc) with 11b when trying to pass wavs wirelessly and would expect the same result with an Airport and iTunes. Oddly, normal ethernet is 10 mbps and passes wav fine...

Golix, the Apogee may be a fine piece of gear, but its not a panacea. I've got a dCS Purcell and Delius in the same room as my miniMac. Spending $1K on an Apogee DAC is a really dumb idea in that context when I can spend $150, get a Waveterminal U24, and pass bit perfect data to my dCS stack. Please don't take this the wrong way, b/c you may be the exception, but Apogee people are like fundamentalists--they love their gear to the extent that there is now only one true God.

I also highly recommend use of RAID, although I may have gone overboard--I'm using a 1TB HW RAID 5 NAS, a Dell Powervault 745N, inside a vCab acoustic rack. Not a cheap solution. Just backing up isn't enough. I've had at least four major disk crashes with large capacity internal and external drives in the last two years. The last one meant reripping 300+ CDs. I feel much more comfortable with RAID 5 and a backup.

As far as anecotal stories re: compression formats, there was a guy on head-fi that was trying to compare EAC ripped wavs and Apple lossless outta iTunes. He claimed he uncompressed the Apple files into wavs and found that they matched, bit for bit, with the EAC ripped version. He conclusion was therefore that iTunes is a decent ripper. My conclusion would be that, if that is the case, its hard for me to believe that Apple lossless sounds worse than a wav, since it is a wav. Although, I have not compared and stranger things have happened.

Ed, is that right?

I just assumed so because all the ethernet cables at work are blue and the ones I bought were as well. And all the gray ones I've seen were crossover.

Damn, I can't trust Office Depot for jack then! LOL!

Actually, its Eric...

My house if far less color coded w.r.t. ethernet cables, I got gray, blue, yellow, white, green, orange, red...

I never thought, as joe-average-consumer, that I'd be acting as the IT department for a home network that involves three desktop PCs, one mini Mac, one tablet PC, two laptops, one Xbox, one PS2, one NAS, four routers, two serial port servers, one USB server, one 802.11 AP, three audiotrons, and one CD30. I have IP address conflicts in my friggin' house.

Gunbei, most big companies buy ethernet cabling in bulk, slice off what they need where they need it. Belkin sells a rainbow of choices. Happy happy CAT 5.

Edesilva, regarding Apple Lossless I'm mostly interested in playback, AL vs. WAV. Does decoding AL dirty it up somehow. Don't know what I'm looking for or how that comparison would be made. But if I'm going to move to a Mac for playback, I only want to make that move once.

I've been looking at the Apogee MiniDAC as well. Seems like the Waveterminal would sure open up the options. You're happy with it? (And where'd you find it for $150?)