Streamer Selection - Thoughts Requested Please!

Norust.

I respect everyone's opinions who have moved on to more expensive streamers. But I did what you did and stopped at the Bluesound Node with PD Creative PS and Denafrips Pontus 12th anniversary. It sounds so good to me but when I wanted to step up- I went with a Bluesound Node X and a Teddy Pardo PS which has not arrived yet. I like the Bluesound ecosystem and OS as well....

I've been enjoying using Roon with a Musica Capella III connecting with an I2S output to a Holo May Dac.

Sweet!

 

 rbstehno

you have a lot of misconceptions

"iMO, Mac minis are much quiete"r no they are not we are not talking about fan noise but electrictrical noise which is what EVERY dedicated server is. Also, I believe these factors that weigh heavily on sq:

a server of any kind in your audio room is bad, no this is wrong if the server has been designed for low noise rfi t makes no difference where the server is located

 

Our servers combat noise in a number of ways first the cpu is a low noise cpu designed to run Roon efficiently without requiring an excessivily fast cpu the greater the cpu’s processing power the greater the noise

We employ a 3d printed all copper cpu shield designed to shield the cpu and eliminate rfi radiation.

 

Our OS is one of the keys to running roon to maximize sound quality

We run Roon in its own CPU core

We run machine housekeeping on its own CPU core

We employ a third core for fille allocation and caching.it is for all of these reasons a dedicated server will outperform a mac mini, a mac mini is a great little computer but it has not been designed or sound quality.

lastly i2s is not better then USB as there are no standards between

manufacturer’s so i2s doesn’t mean everything will work, where usb is guaranteed to work.

 

so it comes down to design by the way the server is built

We have sold and tested: Aurender, auraylic, Sotm, baetis and laufer tehnnik,lumin and Innous al vs mac minis and custom pc solutions

 

so long story short we have years of actual testing.

 

Dave and Troy

Audio intellect nj

us importers 432evo music servers

@audiotroy - I am a new here but believe your above response was directed at comments by @rbstehno so I have linked him by the @ here so he can view your post.  

From your earlier post on page one I see that you are a vendor and from what I could pick up from the verbiage, the streamer you are suggesting is the 432 EVO music server. I have no issue at all with vendor responses and welcome information to assist me in my selection.  In this case I had to take the initiative by doing the work myself to figure out who you were, the product represented and seek out the reviews/info as there were no links in your post.  I had a bit of confusion in following your comments.  I went to the review in the Absolute Sound review and figured out that the $7,800 price for the EVO server you mentioned was EVO's middle tier offering and not their entry level offering.  A bit of time in searching showed that  EVO designates their entry level server as the Standard for $3,500 - which is in my range.  You did point out the platforms upgradeability which would be a big plus. 

Net is the user management software of either LMS or Roon for the EVO is not in my wheelhouse at this time.  I also understand that in addition a to whatever management software is selected, a local player would be required to access Roon or LMS in order to establish the EVO's operating parameters.  I am not ready to take all this on and simply want to add a streamer to utilize Tidal. 

I am sure that EVO servers are top tier products and wish you success in your marketing efforts.  

let me step in here. Audiotroy, you are wrong on many fronts and don't understand how hardware/software works.

"electrictrical noise"? You bring up cpu's when you tried to explain noise. The cpu's that any 3rd party server uses are not specifically built to run Roon. For example, Auralic runs/used to use the Tesla G1 cpu. Do you think the Auralic engineers went to the Tesla chip manufacturer and told them to make a unique processor to run Roon? Do you think Aurender engineers went to Intel to ask them to build the chip they use to specifically run Roon? Come on, nobody believes that, and Intel/Apple/AMD would laugh at somebody that would come in to ask them to build a specific chip to run a specific app that you would only sell a few thousand of them, if Intel/Tesla would design/build such a cpu, it would cost millions of dollars for each cpu. Aurender claims they run a low powered Intel chip and you stated the same, but if you compare Intel cpus to Apple or AMD Ryzen cpus, intel is not low powered, why do you think Apple went away from Intel. 

Another misconception you have is your statement: "We run Roon in its own CPU core". You have no control over this, it's how Roon is built, its out of your hands. Roon uses multithreading which utilizes a single cpu, it isn't written to multitask/parallel process over multiple cpu's. This is why the bigger the music library is/ or the more endpoints you have, Roon will eventually saturate the cpu its running on, that's why if you have a large music library, you will need a faster cpu. Most enterprise software multitasks/parallel processes over all the cpu's in the server to prevent such bottlenecks.If you look at your system resources running Roon, you will notice that cpu is getting saturated whereas the other cores are idle.

Your years of testing are flawed IMO. What would you test?  What does your testing actually consist of? You bring up cpu's, do you actually test the noise difference between an M2 Apple cpu vs a Tesla G1 cpu vs the low powered Intel cpu? No. Do you actually benchmark different flavors of linux? No. Every streamer is a server, it has a cpu, memory, and an OS. How many iterations of each of these components have you tested? Did you test the Tesla G1 cpu using Ubuntu v18 vs Ubuntu v20? How about Fedora? 

Bottom line, you don't know which cpu is the noisiest. You don't know which OS is the most efficient or the best OS for say USB or i2s. I do know that most of the streaming servers run a proprietary/tainted version of Linux, and with this, you either have to have the manufacturer update/or fix any OS issues, or if they are out of business, you will have to hire a Linux hacker to tweak the system. I don't use any hacked/proprietary/tainted Linux on any of my servers.