Mac Laptop & Sound Cards

Rbstehno -

Impressive and thorough approach.

Could you please tell us how many unique CD titles you have, and in how many formats. Would be helpful to give people some perspective on how you ended up with this much data.

Also could you explain where the Mini and RAID 5 rig is located in your home, how much space it takes and if its Firewire or SATA.

It's important that newbies (especially the many who are trying computer playback for the first time) are not scared off by the kind of complexity you are wrestling with, so any context you could provide would be invaluable.

Ckorody - Thanks for expressing my condition! I'm actually starting to get a handle on a lot of this but am grateful for Audiogon members as the guys and girls at the Apple Store don't seem to understand what I'm getting at - i.e., highest quality musical downloads.

Thanks again, everyone. All info is helpful to me, and I'm sure, others.

By the way, yesterday I ordered a 500gb hard drive. Will probably get another 500 for back up but at this time will have 820gb by next week.

Ckorody - i have approx 1500 cd's, 20 sacd's, and hundreds of albums. i use the mini for my browsing the net, for work, and it is also used as a music and file server for the other macs in the house. all the macs backup there disks to the multiple 500gb drives attached to the mini.
i work out of my home so i have a decent audio setup in my den: dk design, sony dvp9000es, nikko fm tuner, an adcom gda-700 dac (just purchased tonight), totem speakers, definitive technology sub, and an airport express which is hooked up to the adcom dac. the sony is also hooked up to the dac.
i have a dedicated audio room that has all classe gear with totem mani 2 speakers.

the 500gb drives are hooked up by firewire. i have been looking to purchase a NAS multi-terabyte storage system that will allow me to use raid 10 or raid 5. there was a unit on ebay that just went for $600 for a 2 terabyte unit. if i buy this NAS unit, i can hook this up in a closet with a network connection and i can get rid of all the 500gb drives i have on my desk.
btw: the adcom dac really cleaned up the sound that was coming out of the airport express. smooth, and had to turn the subwoofer down a bit, the bass was more there.

Hi RB -

I figured you must have more going on then just the CDs - I have 1,500+ in Apple Lossless on one 400Gb and one back-up.

Do you have your LPs ripped as well? How big is a file? I am not a vinyl guy (have to practice self control somewhere) so I have not had the chance to play with that.

FWIW I have been much, much happier since I left Firewire for SATA. Beyond it being faster - which is nice when cloning or backing up (obviously not a playback issue) it is so much more robust. Doesn't care how its shut down or started up etc. The new 32Mb cache drives rock. I cloned my whole music drive (375Gbs) in less then 2 hours.

Still I am with you, a NAS would be great - especially to get the noise out of the room.

Excellent thread!

I'm using my Apple PowerBook G4 as transport feeding wirelessly an Apple Airport Express connected by minijack to RCA on my Denon AVR 3805 surround amp. I'm looking at using the Toslink connection for sound quality improvement

I have a question regarding preferences on iTunes: under Playback, is it better to have the option 'sound equalizer' ON (not sure about the exact English wording, I'm using French version of the soft, anyway it's the third one from the top)?

Thanks for your help