azteca x

Boy, sure is quiet in here. If Chris is reconsidering things due to new chips or components, that's cool, just wondering if it's totally on the backburner.

Bumpity bump! Trying to be patient but was definitely expecting one of the NUC articles by now. Eager to build.

Thunderbolt 1 and Thunderbolt 2 are both massive overkill for audio, including surround and DSD. If you buy a decent NAS you'll be maxing out the speeds attainable by spinning disk hard drives anyhow. The only way you can saturate Thunderbolt is with a really intense and expensive raid array of SSDs (which again, would never be saturated doing audio tasks or even dealing with Blu Ray remuxes) or by daisychaining a bunch of stuff (which is also unnecessary in this context). Don't confuse the theoretical limits of a protocol with the real world results. It also raises the cost of the motherboards involved/limits the selection. For example: AnandTech | Promise Pegasus2 M4 (4x1TB) Thunderbolt 2 DAS Review Thunderbolt on PCs is also a gamble as there is not the same level of integration as with Apple.

Fair enough. I think the tests (Jriver in particular) would take all of about 60 seconds, and I'm not going to purchase one with no idea of how it will perform, so I was hoping you could help. But it's your call. This is an obscure item so I really don't think anyone has run these sorts of benchmarks.

This is a very cool find. Thank you for sharing. Bob, I believe it is locked in to using Windows if you read the Newegg reviews - not good if you want to use Linux but for this price I think you can't complain too much. I also saw that you can get a version with 64GB of storage for $20 more, which seems fair. Joelha, could you do us all a favor and run a few basic benchmarks? 1) Run a disk speed test like HD Tune HD Tune website - they're using a weird type of storage rather than a normal SSD so I'm curious how fast it is. 2) Benchmark JRiver Media Center ( free trial if you don't have it: JRiver Media Center - Download) and run "Benchmark," which is under the Help menu. This would be super helpful as I would like a cheap Jriver box.

You could always use JRMC instead of JPlay since JPlay is basically designed to be inefficient/taxing on a computer. JRiver vs JPLAY Test Results - Blogs - Computer Audiophile Archimago's Musings: MEASUREMENTS: Part II: Bit-Perfect Audiophile Music Players - JPLAY (Windows). Anyhow, really looking forward to the article being posted!

The day approacheth

1 month to go, woo-hoo!

It's been about two months since the start of the thread. Whaddya say, Chris?

Boy oh boy, circular subjective arguments in here. Yeehaw.

-Updated USB card impressions. There is more out there now - for example, the Paul Pang USB card which costs much less than the SotM. -Affordable linear power supplies. -I think the Samsung 840 EVO is a fantastic value and encourage you to look at that for the OS and playback app. It also has very low power consumption. It's still competitive power-wise next to the new 850 Pro. AnandTech | Samsung SSD 850 Pro (128GB, 256GB & 1TB) Review: Enter the 3D Era -Testing if the computer has enough juice to use features like Volume Leveling, downsampling, DSD to PCM conversion. I get that the lowest end model might need to give up things like DSD to PCM but it's worth testing and noting. -More than 4GB of RAM. It would be nice to have some breathing room for the OS to do its thing and still be able to load large playback files to RAM (as I imagine some will choose to listen to the bigger DSD flavors). -Related, 64-bit OS. It's 2014, it's time for compatibility's sake. -low TDP i3 or i5 CPU. You can get a lot of power for little money and I see no need to handicap the system in a way that renders it obsolete in two years unless you find, in testing, that it affects the performance of the CAPS.

Well said, Paul. The fact that it seems impossible to fit in a pants pocket really doesn't help. I walked around on my lunch break today with my iPod in my jeans pocket, then later in my shirt pocket. It fits in an exercise armband. A portable designed for stationary use....hm. Charlie at Ayre obviously knows his stuff [understatement] and Neil might be speaking in such sweeping terms for marketing purposes, as the folks he's targeting are aware of iTunes and streaming services and maybe Bandcamp. But if he truly doesn't know, I hope to the dread god Sonorus that the folks building the web store did a SWOT analysis.

Yeah, you might want to make sure everyone plays nice, though! I'd hate to see people getting their enthusiasm squashed by curmudgeons.

You just got mentioned in a Pono Kickstarter update! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-where-your-soul-rediscovers-music/posts/781375 Prepare for traffic...