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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
dbtom2
383 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
5,899 posts
 
@ghosthouse yes it decodes all those files from a NAS.
rbstehno
1,476 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.
ghosthouse's avatar
ghosthouse
4,318 posts
 
@rbstehno 
Hi and thanks for that detailed history.  The Aries Mini does sound interesting.  My music is on a Western Digital powered external hard drive so I'm not tied to a device with internal drive to hold it.  

The good news now is that Auralic's control app can be downloaded to an iPhone.    

rbstehno - Running the Aries, do you miss the Audirvana software at all? Does the DS Lightning and now Lumin software provide similar functionality with the Aries?  OR are these simply control programs doing nothing to enhance the "bits to music" conversion process? Let me know please.  

Thanks to everyone for their input.
rbstehno
1,476 posts
 
Internal or external are the same in regards to noise in your audio room. You don't want any spinning disk in the same room you listen to music in. Buy either a NAS drive or mount the drive on another computer in another part of your home.
1 thing I should have mentioned is that I designed and implemented a switched Gb network that all routers and devices attach to. Very fast for both audio and video.
as far as the GUI goes, the Lumin and DS Lightning software is light years ahead of the Mac based audio programs. I was using the 1st release of audirvana on the iPad and it was crude but I knew it is a work in progress. I like the DS software better but Lumin sounds better. What's nice I can pick which 1 to use.
With audirvana, I got rid of iTunes and let audirvana control everything which sounded better.


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