MUSIC SERVER - HOW DO YOU............

Again, thanks for all the food for thought. I knew it would happen, the engineer part of me took over, 1 am this morning and i'm still doing research. Seems reguardless of which way i go(squeezebox,Emperical Audio) the most important thing is to get the digital signal to my DAC with the lease amount of jitter possible. It appears their are software upgrades available for the SB Touch as well as hardware and both the SB and EA would work best by being hardwired rather than streamed. Also, cable type plays an important role.

So right now I'm leaning toward a NAS, after looking around at the external hardrives i have laying around stuffed with music plus all the CD's i'm guesstimating I have about 1.5TB of music at flac compression, so need at least 2TB plus another 2TB for backup.

Also think I will use an I Pad. The SB or EA decision remains a tough one. I just realized my DAC upsamples all data streams to 24bit before sampling at 768khz.

Hope I'm on the right track, I truly enjoy the way my system sounds and certainly don't want to take a step back. By the way what I have are McIntosh MC300 amp, M46 pre-amp(that i will be takening out of the system), MR85 tuner(I will also be selling the tuner), MDA1000 DAC, MCD205 cd player and all plugged in to a Powervar 12. Speakers are Tannoy D700's and also a McIntosh SL-1 subwoofer that is used at times. When the little lady won't put up with anymore I use a pair of Sennheiser HDR 180 headphones.

Good for you.

Yes jitter is a real problem and most just hope their Dac deals with it. I'll let you in on a little secret. Virtually none of them do much to correct it. The Empirical Off Ramp converts USB and virtually eliminates jitter. I have tried it on a number of Dacs with a number of very very experienced audiophiles and we all agree it is an amazing device.

I use an Anti Cable Spdif cable which was about $150. It is on par with the Stereolab but less $. That's an easy way to go and it sounds really really good. They're not on the website so you'll have to contact them directly to get one.

At any rate good luck w/ the rest of your journey.

Thanks, I'm trying to understand. I also appreciate all the links that have been offered, guess I like to do a lot of research.

I ran across some info on a new USB converter, a music fidelity v link. Seemed intersting to me because it is simple. The hype says it is very good for what that is worth.

Anyway the more I research the more I understand and one thing seems certain, the future is digital.

Thanks all!

I am running the 2010 Mac mini with 120 OWC SSD, 8 gb ram, 2.6GHz and 2 lacie 1T (7200) firewire 1394b with apple lossless and the original Mac mini 1394b rehoused for back-up. Everything into the W4S DAC-2 and the initial sound is very good. I am looking forward to the improvements over the next 200 hours of burnin.

I don't regret boxing my MF Nuvista 3D for the convenience or †he sound.

As to cables, and this is what I have read and researched (but there are definately two+ families of thought). I actually prefer the toslink approach as it keeps the transfer of data as a light form. The RCA/SPDIF is an electronic signal and (from what I have read) more suceptable to environmental factors.

With toslink, I am of the opinion that one does not need to spend a large amount of money on these cables, that the connectors are actually more important than the cable itself (secure, prevent light leakage, etc). Obviously, since conveying the signal as light, the key is to not allow for a kink in the cabling.

Over the years, I have had many more problems with RCA/SPDIF cables failing (two times) than toslink cables (I have never had one fail).

I have also found no difference as to the cost of the cable and its performance (I have a pretty revealing system and can certainly tell a notable difference with difference ICs and SCs).