BobL

Thanks Alex, We oldies are very bad at admitting we are getting older, especially to ourselves, until we are forced to. I'll check, next time I feel strong enough, with the USB stick as drive- I'm just a bit nervous about what the result might be! At the moment I'm comforting myself with having tried a demo of a famous name one-box unit, to see if that might be possible as part of downsizing. Although it was playing back 96K versions of tracks I know at 44.1K, it still had the 'throw-up" effect. Cheers Bob

Thanks for this, Freann, and apologies to anybody who might have wasted time trying to replicate what I wrote above. In fact, it is just a problem with my hearing loss. I have now tried the right experiment, comparing the sound of A+ calling the file directly from my HDD with the same file via Ramdisk. They sound the same to me now, though this was certainly not true a couple of years ago. A pity I didn't think of trying this earlier...

My thanks for this also, Alex! Also for developing the Regen and MMK, which have also made an enormous difference to my system, particularly when the cascaded Regens are run from my LPS (Sorry, but still Paul Hynes!) However, as you said many posts ago, Ramdisk is not very convenient. Nevertheless, I had got quite used to calling up Ramdisk Creator every time I started up, choosing music files from my external HDD via iTunes, loading these into a 5G Ramdisk, and then moving these to Audirvana’s PlayQueue. Very clunky, and it’s a bit annoying to have to plan the listening in advance; it would be so much easier to have all my library available in ”real time”, so I had been thinking about gutting an old Time Capsule which has a noisy disk drive, and installing a new quieter one in it to make a cheapo NAS/BlueJeans cable source. BUT… I may have found a better way. However, I still can’t really believe it works; if anyone else had told be I would not have believed it. I’m hoping someone can be convinced enough to try repeating what will probably sound crazy, and I’d be glad of results and any comments. Two years ago, in the days of the old Audirvana 1.5, I had set up a collection of Playlists, but I assumed that these could not be used with Ramdisk. When I tried copying any of these to the Ramdisk, all I got was an m3u image occupying only a few K, when the Lists are anything from several 100M to a few G, so obviously the files were not getting transferred. However, a week or so ago I tried the stupid thing of moving this m3u image to the PlayQueue (in version 2.5.3), and to my amazement, there were all the items on the original Playlist. Even more amazingly, they play, and to my ears the sound is the same as when I put the original files into Ramdisk to play them! I am baffled by this. Although I am apparently only using a few MB of the 5GB available, it plays as if the entire Playlist, several G, were there in Ramdisk. It seemed that I could now put my entire collection on to the Ramdisk as images of the Playlists, and choose one (or more!) for the PlayQueue. Of course I still need to set up the Ramdisk each time I start up the Mini, and move the images on to it, but that is relatively trivial now I am used to it; maybe I won't power down the Mini so much. The Audirvana playlist files are quite old; the folder was created in Jan 2013, so presumably this was using the 1.5 version. As an experiment, I went back to 1.5.12 and recreated my present collection as Playlists, then reverted to 2.5.3. For this, I uninstalled the CAD file so that I could see what I was doing. One maybe important point is that I don’t hear much if any improvement from playing with the CAD installed. Maybe my 79-year old ears are not hearing as well as they used to, but thinking back, I’m not sure I checked this when I first installed the CAD; it was the thing to do, so I did it. If anybody else has views on this, that would be useful (if only to calibrate my hearing!) These new playlists include a lot of files which I have been using as test files over the last few years, and Yes, I still hear no difference between playing these from the Playlist image on Ramdisk, and from the original files on Ramdisk. This is a more immediate check than anything I can do about the CAD comparison, which needs an accurate memory over several minutes. I have no clue about what’s going on. For those who understand something of the inner workings of Audirvana, is it possible that the m3u image file calls up the original source and feeds it in via the Ramdisk? One final comment- if this works for other people, you hardly need to increase your RAM size for Alex’s trick- 4G should be more than enough….

Alex. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been looking at this with a lot of interest, but a bit nervously. Thanks for taking it on- good luck, and keep us posted, especially if you agree with Pascal!

Some of us have found an LPS transforms the Regen from a "Hm, if you say so" sevice to one whixh shouts from the rooftops" YOU NEED ME!!"

Moi aussi, on both counts, if a bit late for the second one! I can't be certain that this is the best improvement Alex and John have made to my system, because they are all so interconnected. Without the Regens, I might not be able to hear how good this one is, etc., etc. A elated query, to Alex and anybody else with information: A while back, when the 2014 Mini appeared, you suggested that the PCIe card version could be used in place of the SDHD card. Has anybody done this? I accepted the idea at the time, but thinking it over, I'm not sure what goes where, OS or music files?

Thanks for reminding me of this. It suggests to me that those of us lucky enough to have a powered Green Regen might want tohave it permanently in the line to the drive which has the main Library, since most of us are probably are working with less than ideal rips, and we may need to re-do them.

Jawohl!. Not just the Regens but all the other tweaks along the line. My problem is with the implication that any copy is by definition worse. Maybe the point is that at the time, a 'copy' meant burning a new disc, on a rig that could not hope to match the quality of theproduction machinery used for the CD.

Rob, your quote has been rammed in ront of me by the problem above: "If you can't hear the difference between an original CD and a copy of your CD, you might as well give up your career as a tester. The difference between a reconstituted FLAC and full size WAV is much less than that, but it does exist. - Cookie Marenco" Especially in theRegen context, what does it mean?/````````/ `excuse the ( I hope) temporary dyslexia. a rip is a cd copy. If, with Mini+LPS, +mmk+2x Regens. I play it bckthere is an almighty difference,but not in the direction meant!!!!!!

astrostar59;507265] The Uptone Audio MMK is the last I will probably make in a series of hifi tweaks to my system (never say never!). /QUOTE] I entirely agree with all your comments about what the MMK + a good LPS will do: with these you have removed the noise from the SMPS and the fan,and they are probably the biggest improvements you can make. However onere are some further tweaks I would recommend, particularly the Uptone Regen. Also worth trying is putting your OS and Audirvana on to a 'good' SDHD card, and running some tracks from RAMdisk. This makes such a difference for me that I use it all the time even though it is very clunky, and means most of the features of Audirvana are just not available. By 'good' I mean a card which works reasonably rapidly- even some supposedly very high speed ones turn out to be very slow when used for this. I use a cheap Transcend 32G 200x card, and some other recommendations can be found in the various Regen threads on CA. The free CAD script, which removes a lot of unnecessary Mac processes, is also useful, though you need a bit of practice to set things up without the usual Desktop there.

+1! Here is what I wrote in a totally different context, where I thought that an effect I was seeing might be due to having Regens (I have two) in the line, so I took them out, and: "Ugh! Now I remember why I was so pleased when I found what these would do.." Quadman describes more precisely what I meant about the sound. It might also be relevant that Regen(s) allow you to hear more of the music, but also are very good at showing up other changes in the system. I could only hear a significant improvement from changing a power supply because the Regens were in the line. Just one warning- a very few DACs, but my M-DAC is one, need a better power supply than the standard one to work properly. However nearly everybody else has no problem with this. [TABLE] [TR] [TD]pink fish media > discussion > audio[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: navbar, colspan: 3]MDAC First Listen (part 00101100) [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

You do ask difficult questions (!), and I'm not sure there is an answer to either; certainly I have not seen many (maybe one, not sure where) reports of a direct comparison of the sort you are looking for. However, if I read your equipment spec correctly, you are working with an unmodified Mini. If so, there is no way that can begin to approach the rest of your high-end gear. A few years ago, with a system way below yours, I found that a decent CD transport was well ahead of what a Mac (Power PC or Mini) could do, despite various tweaks popular at the time. However, once I put in a good LPS instead of the very dirty Mini SMPS, the Mini was immediately well ahead, and since then almost every tweak reported in this thread has been an improvement. Have I got something to compete with a top-end Linn or Naim? I don't know, but I'm pretty happy with what I have! On the other hand, this route is not exactly hassle-free; it does take patience, and usually there are a number of "am I wrecking this?" moments. Only you can answer your second question!

For anybody I have misled, apologies! My earlier contribution is not true: I have now carried out the obvious (or not obvious, see below) experiment of sticky tape on the 5v pin in the USB connector. If that is all that I do, all the data goes through, music plays, and the Mini sees the DAC and reports back exactly what it did when all 4 wires were connected. My earlier report was with the ground wire also disconnected; although that works on some systems (see contributions from Karin on the S-Booster thread), I had forgotten that I also have a ground isolator in the USB line! "Not obvious", because I have always been doubtful about the sticky tape in case you want to reverse this later. Putting gunge on to a carefully gold-plated contact doesn't seem like the best idea for expensive cables and components, but I now have a way over that for a preliminary check. I took a cheapo Chinese M-M adaptor and a F-F one and joined them, with tape on the 5v pin between the two. This gives a clunky (but disposable if necessary) isolator. I'm now waiting for my S-Booster isolator, and will report later on what changes this makes.

Join the club! I was a bit surprised by your earlier "Between the computer and Regen the power should always be cut off even if the DAC is self-powered or USB-powered." According to my Mini, my DAC draws exactly 0mA on the 5v line, but to transmit to the DAC (Audiolab M-DAC) that 5v connection must be there. There may be several other systems out there where disconnecting the 5v line is not a good idea, though with the S-Booster Isolator it's not an expensive mistake.