Mac Laptop & Sound Cards

Ckorody, I thank you also. I can fully understand how I might use my Mac with music on its hard-drive and feed thru the USB port, but can you explain how a substantial external hard-drive located at the dac might be used with the Mac located elsewhere might be used to control it. I know that John Tucker at Exemplar is using a AES/EBU connection between his PC based system and his DAC one of which I own. It does not have a USB port. He is talking about a wireless connection to his laptop and using a program called Fubar.

Hi - glad to be of help.

Not sure what John is doing, didn't see anything obvious on the Exemplar website.

Just to be clear, AES/EBU is a pro (balanced using XLRs) signal format like SPDIF. It is a long established high end way to go - but requires an appropriate sound card, DAC and dollars.

USB is an alternative way of getting data out of a computer after it is retrieved from the drive.

Basically wherever the drive is, the data has to come back to the computer so that it can go out via a comm(unication) port - ie USB, Ethernet, Firewire, AES, serial, parallel etc Depending on the computer some of this may be built in, some of it may require a specialized card (ie AES/EBU)

But there is a much bigger issue that has to be dealt with.

I do not know of any drives (not that I have ever made a study) that can output a specific file via USB directly to a DAC. The USB ports on external drives by LaCie, Maxtor etc are all controlled by the computer and as far as I know are solely used to transfer data between drives. (They have simply chosen USB instead of SCSI (old school), Firewire or these days SATA.

The only way I know to use a remote drive is to use what is called a NAS - network area storage device. Basically a NAS is a stack of drives with an intelligent controller hanging on an ethernet network. This works well with a device like a Squeezebox which is also Ethernet based and has the ability to access the drive and retrieve specific files. Since it is an ethernet network the pieces do not need to be co-located. Depending on your situation this could be pretty cost effective since a terrabyte NAS rig is now under a grand.(Buffalo seems to be the low end leader)

Short of a NAS, the solution is to leave the drive by your computer and co-locate either a network/wifi device like the Squeezebox with the DAC - and go from the SB into the DAC; or Airport Express (also wifi) - and go Toslink into the DAC.

There are a couple of very good threads running concurrently with this one that are worth reviewing.

Sorry if this is a bit confusing - its really plug and play, more a case of identifying the square pegs and round holes.

Ckorody, thanks. I need to talk more with John about all of this, but I suspect he must have a processor within his chassis with the big hard drives. If so, I would not be an Apple processor. Then my dilemma would be to just use it as he makes it or to pursue other means using Apple.

TBG - wish I could find what you are looking at - send me a link if you like. This is obviously an add in card that he makes or mods.

Keep in mind that Mac is and has been the computer of choice in recording studios for many, many years. There is a ton of pro and semi-pro stuff out there, including a wide range of I/O (input output) cards some of which no doubt utilize AES/EBU. Others are used for mixing, for effects processing, for managing time code (used to sync double system audio and video) Whether or not there is one to meet your needs (besides Johns) I couldn't say.

If you want to poke around a bit, Apogee and Lynx are two mfgrs you might look at.

Before you go too far down this particular rat hole, keep in mind that the only tricky thing you are talking about is going from the drive to the DAC without coming back to the computer.

At the end of the day it might be easier to put the computer at that end too, then control it with Front Row, a Sailing Clicker etc. Take a look at the current thread "Music Server vs. PC vs. Transport vs. ?" - in particular the comments of Rbstehno for some good ideas.

nas is the way to go for storage. imo, get a 4 drive nas system and use raid-5 to setup the nas. this will allow you to use 3 out of the 4 drives for data. even if you go with nas, you will still need a backup. any computer piece can and will fail. if you don't back it up, be sure you won't lose anything valuable.
here is what my den setup consists of:
totem speakers, definitive technology supercube sub, nikko fm tuner, sony dvp9000es dvd/cd/sacd player, dk design vs-1, adcom gda-700 dac, audio alchemy dti, mac mini running itunes, and airport express in multiple rooms. i go from the sony player and the airport express into the dti unit (cleans up the jitter), then out of the dti to the dac. sounds very good. there was a big improvement using the external dac and an improvement again using the dti.
as for distributing music to other rooms, i have airport express unit hooked up wired and wireless to other systems and i currently control them with my macbook. the macbook allows me to control the mac mini from other rooms to run selections from itunes. i am in the middle of buying an ipod touch which i will use to control the mac mini running itunes from other parts of the house instead of using the macbook.