russ_777

Exactly what I was looking for, thanks. This calculation appears to be more of a crest factor statistic than an actual dynamic range (taken literally) and won't shed much light on what the most startling transients are as it discards the bottom 80% of the RMS & peak values of the 3 second clips if I read it correctly. I understand why it's calculated the way it is - it's just not what the OP asked about.

Thanks for the clarification. The more I thought about OP's question the more questions popped into my noggin. I'm just not sure whether a DR measurement like that would completely represent all of the psychoacoustic effects resulting from the powerful and sudden downbeat. I guess if you look at it from an impulse response perspective, a pure impulse does equate to the entire spectrum. OTOH, I suspect much of the low frequency energy of what one experiences, say from the strike of the bass drum, extends well past the rapid decay of the initial transient from the other instruments. No need to reply to this further, I'm just thinking out loud. ?

Do you know how these numbers are calculated? Are you getting this from a player or plug-in that reports the max and min sample values read from the disc/track? Given the OP's question (biggest burst of energy), I'm not sure that canned software measurements from a plug-in or player would necessarily report exactly what he's asking unless you can window the second or so of the actual transient in question. The one I've seen (admittedly not much) appears to report the max DR across the entire recording and for each track. In those cases the peak amplitude may not immediately follow the minimum amplitude, for the track or the disc.

The one that immediately comes to mind has already been mentioned - Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. I have several recordings of it, but the first one I had may still be my favorite - Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony on Telarc. The entire 20+ minute piece has gradual swings of loudness from near dead silence to the final crescendo. But the moment that is exactly what you are looking for is the initial downbeat of Infernal Dance of King Kaschei. This repeats several times throughout this track, but I think the most impressive would be the initial one. I have no idea what the DR rating or any measurements say, just going by how far I recall jumping out of my MLP chair the first time I listened to it, which happened to be on a system with the ability to play very loud transients without distorting noticeably.

Well I'm not going to say Rob gave you bad advice...as more RAM is usually desirable. The question is at what point do you encounter the law of diminishing returns? RAM size for programs like PM is mainly driven by the file size that is loaded into RAM when using the option to play directly from RAM, as opposed to playing the file from the hard disk. You can do the calculations yourself by estimating how much memory a track or an entire gapless album consumes. For an entire album, 70 minutes * 60 seconds/minute * 24 bits/sample * 192,000 samples/sec / 8 bits/byte ~ 2.5 GB.

Couple of observations. One, in either case you would have a dedicated music server as long as you elected to not use the mini for anything other than serving music. I think you may have meant to say a turnkey or shrink wrapped music server, as the mini requires some configuring. Two, why are you considering such an up optioned mini? 16 GB of RAM? You can get by with 4, and I've never heard of anyone needing more than 8. Basically it appears you are electing to put capabilities (and cost) into the mini that the W4S server does not even have (SSD, 16 GB memory)....it only comes with 2 GB of RAM. The base i5 model with 4GB of RAM will work fine. Pick a player application based on the user interface you like the most. Most of them, Pure Music included, allow free evaluation periods after download. Third, if you're hell bent on spending more than $600 for it (+ cost of player app and external optical drive), why not spend that money on external storage or an external PS? Set up some NAS with redundancy that allows you to access your music library from anywhere connected to your network and provides assurance you won't lose you library with a hard disk crash. Finally, I don't think that you would be able to hear the difference between the two if the mini is properly set up with a quality player such as Pure Music and they use the same DACs and signal chains, with levels matched, in a blindfolded test. Take the comments of reviewers with a pound of salt...unless they did their comparisons in a double blind test set up.