Appreciate everyone’s thoughts and feedback. Since I started this discussion, night after night I proved to myself that a CD does sound a lot better than the same album rip played thru the Mac Mini. While I don’t doubt that running the Mini wired and adding bells and whistles such as EtherRegen to the set up will improve the sound, I still think that the sonic gap between the CD transport and the Mini is just too large to bridge. Yes, we can throw more money into the Mac set up with mods, etc. but...will it get to where the CD transport is sonically? I’m not sure.
So I pulled the trigger on the Auralic G1 and it’s arriving next week. The G1’s wireless capabilities are appealing to me and will allow me to get the Mac out of my system. I’ll give the G1 a few days of continuous burn in before I judge it and compare it to the CD player transport (remember the Marantz player is over 20 years old). I hope it’s at least as good or better than the CD. If it isn’t, I’m down the shipping cost, and back to spinning discs. I also like the concept and flexibility of the CD player with digital inputs such as the Luxman 03x that was mentioned in this thread so this may be my fallback option. I’ll report back on what I hear from the Auralic.
So I pulled the trigger on the Auralic G1 and it’s arriving next week. The G1’s wireless capabilities are appealing to me and will allow me to get the Mac out of my system. I’ll give the G1 a few days of continuous burn in before I judge it and compare it to the CD player transport (remember the Marantz player is over 20 years old). I hope it’s at least as good or better than the CD. If it isn’t, I’m down the shipping cost, and back to spinning discs. I also like the concept and flexibility of the CD player with digital inputs such as the Luxman 03x that was mentioned in this thread so this may be my fallback option. I’ll report back on what I hear from the Auralic.