Absolute top tier DAC for standard res Redbook CD

HChil,

You can PM me at Audiocircle, Compaudiophile or Audioshark dot org to follow up.

Modded Mac Mini, Music Vault, "Clone" Music Server, The Memory Player, YFS, Baetis and CAPS servers are all essentially modified PC's.

Ketchum and others who use these, please offer opinions as compared to going with a design specific music server like the Antipodes, Aurender or TotalDac. I get that you can tweak a computer to any purpose, but I'm having a hard time believing that any level of modification to a computer will sound better then a unit designed from the ground up for the sole purpose of top SQ. Or am I totally off on this thought?

Matt, THEY are all computers and from what I recall Aurender was not even a prticularly good mobo.

Some like Antipodes are (Vortex box) Linux based, others are windows/OSX based. Not sure if any are Android or iOS based...good as they are "light" OS, but so is Linux if done right.

No one is going to write an OS from scartch unless they are a major like an HP. Even HP dropped WebOS which they bought from Palm for $2b (less than 3 years later).Too many $$$$ to maintain constant development.

The best bet is modified/stripped to the Core Linux/or Tablet OS and tweaked for audio. So light as possible general purpose OS that is cthen optimized for the limited purpose of Audio playback/basic networking infrastructure and perhaps Internet access to gather meta-data. Then on top have an optimiser mode to shut down non-essential processes during playback....this includeds even data retrieval from other than quiet/simple ram buffer!

Or so the gurus online claim....

Its an impossi

Mitch2 - yes, the improvement is the lower jitter master clock in the OR5.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Matt - depends on the server. My Mac Mini beats practically every server except for the Antipodes.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio