lamarzocco

Snow leopard server is a completely different install than the standard SL. I have a 2010 SL Server, but it's being used as a server/squeezecenter server plus other duties. SL Server installs a bunch of other apps and services that you wont need, web server, ical server processes, wiki server, authetication, directory, etc... I'm guessing it's probably better not to have all those background processes and just uninstall and install standard snow leopard. You can also add on a 2nd hard drive to 2011 base mini with a hard drive add-on kit from ifixit.

You'll lose another drive to parity so 2 out of the 6 will be storing parity data. Figure on losing another 1.8TB if you use Raid 6. I've used RAID 6 arrays using Areca controllers in the past, and IMO, it's not worth it. RAID is not backup, keep that in mind, ideally you'll want an offline backup copy somewhere. RAID is for high-availability, where you cannot tolerate any downtime due to a drive failure. You should have great read speeds, but write speed will be dependent on the RAID processor. If it's a NAS then you'll be bottlenecked by your ethernet speeds. Nowadays I just use multiple drives and have offline backups via eSATA. I use Chronosync on my Mac which makes it easy to do incremental backups.

My 2006 Mac Pro came with a nvidia 7300GT which was fanless. Not a powerhouse by any stretch, and probably won't handle blu-ray. Then again, we'd have to wait for BD support from apple. There are aftermarket fan replacements from active fans to even fanless... http://www.arctic-cooling.com/catalog/main.php?cPath=2

I like Glenn's cases at http://www.atechfabrication.com Unfortunately these are expensive cases, CNC'd here in the USA not a mass produced import, hence the prices. I don't own any but know a few friends that have some of the older cases and the build quality was top notch. If I needed such a beast and could stomach the price, I'd buy one and support the US economy at the same time.

It appears that there's more to it than "bit-perfect". Over AA people are harping over that Amarra must be manipulating something if the differences are that dramatic and it must doing something to the bits. People hear differences between SSD and a convential spinning hard drive. The bit-perfectness has not changed, only the medium holding the data, yet there appears to be differences in the sound. There were many releases of cPlay, the DIY memory player, where the bit-perfectness had not changed between releases, yet minor changes in code affected the sound. Even different motherboards apparently sounded different. If switching power supplies inject "noise" yet don't affect bit-perfectness, then why do some people hear differences by using a linear power supply? It appears to me, that we don't fully understand all the variables that can affect the sound and bits is bits argument is just one piece of a complex puzzle.

Hmmm.. I used to do a lot of DAT taping of live shows in my younger years. I would think that it would be more of software issue of the system being able to recognize something other than 44.1 or 48khz on DAT. What sampling rate were you recording at 22khz?

What OS was the Matan server using? OS X, Win, Linux? Curious if it was a hackintosh, cMP/cPlay type or linux home-brew...

172/24 or higher resolution files make up oh... less than .1 percent of my music library, a mere fraction, yet I'm sitting here ruling out DACs that cannot process 192/24? Why? I guess it's a bit of future-proofing or chicken vs. egg syndrome. I would like to see more HDMI interfaces on DACs even though it's a very jittery interface. This is still bleeding edge territory, even though computer audio has been around for quite a long time. Only recently has the software and drivers have matured the path to hi-rez. All the audio companies could not afford the software and platform development tools to develop the necessary software to work with their DACS, except in the pro-audio world where DAWs sell and make money. Hopefully this convergence of software and hardware will promote hi-rez music. I think it'll be a long road before we have mainstream hi-rez downloads. For me who's stuck in the 80's music, an era I call horrific digital mastering and processing, vinyl is my hi-rez source for now. Maybe Blu-Ray will help pave a small inroad, but not until the economy improves and the music companies start releasing music that people actually want to listen to in hi-res. The Neil Young Archives is a start.

EarlinAZ, Thanks for the write up. I wish I was able to make up to the symposium. I wonder if the parallel nature of PCI versus the highly serialized nature of PCI-Express accounts for some differences in the sound... Well, finding a G5 is a heck of lot cheaper than a new Mac Pro, but too bad it won't run Snow Leopard. Was the Martan server using a Lynx card as well or is it using it's own electronics?

Oh my! That listening session/room/gear is about as ideal as you can get, hopefully no one fought over the sweet spot. Can't wait for your next part, I'm real interested to read opinions on the differences between combinations of system/hardware/software.

I guess we'll know more from the symposium attendees but anyone know what type of server he builds?

I looked at the Magma PCI extender awhile back, but ruled it out due to complexity and cost. By the time you add up all the pieces it's almost better to find a used Weiss AFI1 and get firewire to AES. Chris, maybe you could add one more system eval to the symposium Mac Pro -> Sonic via firewire -> AES to Berkeley or some other DAC. Voltron had a similar setup at Canjam where we could A/B the Model 4 to the BADA (connected via AES to the Model 4). I actually preferred the BADA over the Model 4, but that was a limited listening session and levels were not perfectly matched.

I have an MB Air 1.86/128gb SSD and I love it's portability, but I wouldn't use it for audio. It's too limiting in all respects, one USB port, soldered non-upgradeable RAM and the SSD is difficult to upgrade since it's a 1.8" and uses a LIF interface instead of a standard SATA connector. If you want to LAN connect to your server then you'll be sharing the USB port with your DAC and you'll be limited to 100mb LAN. the 100mb ethernet isn't much of problem, but I'd rather have a dedicated NIC. I'd go with new unibody macbook pro as it now has firewire and far more upgradeable.

I've not used the EFI-X, but opinions are mixed on support and stability. With the discovery of using an EFI boot like Boot-132 or EFI partition and installing using the "Retail" Leopard disc, building Hackintoshes has been a whole lot easier. With either of those methods actual system kexts aren't patched or overwritten, but rather pre-loaded in an EFI partition instead. This way Leopard is untouched. No longer are distros like iDeneb, Kalyway, Leo4all etc, needed. It literally took me less than half an hour to install leopard onto a spare drive in my 2008 Mac Pro, and installed into my Nehalem Core i7 920 and had all 4 cores with HT (8 threads) overclocked to 3.4ghz working. Easiest Hackintosh build I've done so far. I'm planning on building another hackintosh using the cPlay design described over on Audio Asylum. I'm hoping to build a couple of 12v linear supplies in conjunction with a picoPSU on a gigabyte g31M motherboard with an intel e8400. I hope to compare using my Lynx AES16 PCI card and see if Nehalem vs. low powered linear-supply based Penryn e8400. Too bad I can't put the card in my Mac Pro since it lacks PCI slots.

To switch libraries within iTunes, quit iTunes and hold the option key and launch iTunes, it'll then ask you which library you want to open or create a new one.