scottsol

The official term for Ayre employees is now Ayrehead. You can thank Jake (or excoriate him) for that.

Several days isn’t close to enough.

I believe a single emoji is no longer sufficient to prove that a post is a sincere attempt at humor with no ulterior motives. The time is also coming when you will come across as stuck up if you insist on using punctuation marks.

Ayre has just released version R specifically to deal with the Roon certification issue.

My experience has been that irrelevant factors make as big a difference as important ones. In any case, the Aurender represents a hardware and software solution while The Roon is just software.

It’s more like optimizing the Mac for single purpose use. This means turning off every nonessential process, both by closing apps and going into the OS. It means running an operation that makes sure Roon or whatever program is important is always given priority (Roon may already include a routine for this.) There may need to be things like increasing ram and various other mods. There are lots of threads and articles on this site about that very thing. There are also suppliers who custom build computers for audio use that have been designed from the ground up to leave out all the things that would be needed in a general purpose computer as well as taking steps to isolate the circuitry from both electrical and mechanical noise. Roon makes such devices but li have not compared them with other specialty computers. I’m sure somebody here has.

I have no particular opinion about the sound quality of Roon, but when comparing an Aurender vs Roon running on a non optimized iMac you are putting the Roon at a distinct disadvantage.

Almost any outside wired source is going to be at a different ground potential than your electrical system. If any piece in your audio system is wired to this outside source and is also wired to another piece in your system there will be a ground loop. The result may or may not be audible noise, but there will be additional noise of some sort. Even inaudible noise can result in lower sound quality. If everything in the system was grounded ideally this wouldn’t be an issue, but that is a rare situation. The alternative is to “disconnect” the offending ground. The quotation mark is because you shouldn’t simply eliminate the ground of your cable system. The idea is to break the ground only at low frequencies as the most concerning noise from a ground loop is normally at 50Hz or 60Hz. The method probably used by the PS model is the one found in the industry standard VRD-1FF from Jensen Transformers. In this case capacitors are used to block low frequencies while retaining a good ground at high frequencies. Lots of devices use the same or similar schematic but the part quality and construction precision will affect how cleanly the intended signal is passed and how well RF radiation is suppressed. To check your system, unplug the cable connection and see if your sound improves. If it does, a ground isolator is worth considering.

Boulder actually started using the 32 Amp AC connector in 1997 with the introduction of the 2000 series. 32A-Power-Connector-Explanation.pdf

By this “logic” we could say that there must be something fundamentally wrong with the anti MQA position since the same arguments against MQA are repeated over and over.

In the linked article Bob Carver claims in no uncertain terms that current MQA files are identical to standard files. He also states that the early demo files used crosstalk cancellation. However, His side bar is ambiguous, implying that he did a technical analysis of the resulting analog signals while also referring to him recognizing the sound of crosstalk cancellation. The end of the side bar points to there having been no technical analysis. “The enhanced sense of depth, space and clarity were far more likely to have come from the proven signal processing phe- nomenon of crosstalk cancellation than due to magic filters and bit depth tricks.” (My emphasis) https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7c4708_a6ad10f865f74369903c44599a91b04b.pdf

No need to check, Ayre has unequivocally stated that the QX-5 is not designed to handle a USB device with a large number of files on it. It’s not an inherent problem with an SSD vs a memory stick, but one assumes the SSD would be used because of it’s larger capacity, and that is the problem.

Not if you are willing to forego Roon. Among others, the Melco units are compatible with BubbleUPnP, Kazoo and Mconnect.

The Melco can be used as a renderer and that is why they provide a USB audio output, which would otherwise be useless.

I suggest you post this in the software section.