bmckenney

Found a post from Gordon that suggests running an app called USB Prober. I did this. The app calls a bus a hub btw. And it recognizes 5 hubs/buses in this mini. And hubs can be OHCI or EHCI, whatever that means. And each hub has ports. Some of the hubs have 7 ports, some 5 and one has 3. Interestingly the one with 3 ports has not responding as a status for all the ports. I can see the Ayre QB9 on the first hub, port 1, and the RF receiver is on port 5. Which confirms what I saw in system profiler. I can't seem to get the Ayre to be on its own dedicated bus or hub with this Mini so I guess there isn't much I can do about it. I can't imagine it will make a sonic difference either. I have at least disabled the RF.

There are no other usb devices. It's a headless mini server. And storage is on firewire. I should have stated that. And just for the record, there are 5 usb connections in this mini. And I have searched the archives here and found posts that recognize that IR and BT are on the buses. But I haven't found an explanation or something that corroborates my findings exactly.

I have changed my dac usb connection on a mac mini amongst all the different connections on the back and looked in the System Profiler each time. I was hoping to validate that I have a dedicated USB bus for the dac. There are 4 USB connections on this mini (2009 I believe). System profiler shows weird results for USB configuration data. There are 4 buses displayed and the top two buses show a Bluetooth device on the first and an IR Receiver device (wireless?) on the second. The other two buses just say high speed USB bus. When I change the connection my dac uses the dac will either show only on one of the first two buses. It will never show up on the last two buses. And it will show up on either of the first two as if the dac is sharing the bus with either the bluetooth or the IR Receiver. So it seems like my dac will never have its own dedicate bus. But that doesn't seem right to me.

I wanted to add to some of the other replies. So how does this product sound compared to similar technology options? I read a lengthy review and it didn't have the important content that us audiophiles really care about.

I currently have a headless Mac Mini as my server with a couple of different player apps and access it using a VNC client on a Windows XP laptop via wireless. I'd like to see if I can hear an improvement by turning off wireless in the house but still use my XP laptop to remote in to the Mini. Is there a solution?

I'm having a weird issue on my Mac Mini Snow Leopard server. Imports using Itunes are not recognizing the CD i.d. via gracenotes. The server has internet connectivity. And there is a new volume mount showing up on the server called "Audio", which has a few files in it including one called audio.exe. These seems to be related to an older legacy apple media player. Why this volume is showing up on the server is a big mystery. I did uninstall itunes and re-install and the first CD import worked fine, gracenotes recognized the CD and and tracks. But for the second CD import the Audio volume showed up again and all subsequent CD imports failed to get a gracenotes lock. When I load the same CD on another Mac Mini in the house it recognizes the CD and tracks. I'm about to do a fresh snow leopard install. Any thoughts, suggestions, before I say I do? This did happen shortly after installing Audirvana, but I'm not sure it's related. And why the mystery volume mounts is so odd.

Just because it's not on the cash list, doesn't mean its not a good choice. It's used by many happy audiophiles, which is a better indicator than one reviewers recommendation list, IMO. I've always felt the cash list has its limitations. He can't cover it all.

This is a great subject, but more suitable for diyaudio.com if you ask me. But it is great to see some balanced power enthusiasm on any audio board. There have been quite a few posts on this board about balanced power benefits for audio. I recommend balanced power and rank it as high as room acoustics and treatment, speaker quality/performance, speaker to room matching and integration. Balanced power is well ahead of the electronics such as amp, dac, music server, software etc in importance for good sound, but it doesn't get the coverage on audio boards for what ever reason. Electronics and software are handicapped by poor power. But then again, good power is handicapped by poor acoustic setups. I have a 240V balanced Torus and it is one of my must haves right up there with my speakers.

When I first found this site and the boards I read in a matter of minutes that with a computer based front end, everything matters. That you need each component of this type of front end to be of good quality to get the goods. Well, I can say that it works for me. I started with a QB9 and Mac Mini with stock drive and 2GB ram. Upgraded to 4GB or ram, small improvement. External firewire drive, again small improvement. Better players than itunes, bigger improvements. But I was pretty frustrated that this front end didn't really do it for me. It was good, but not great. I'm picky for sure. I finally replaced the stock Ayre USB cable with a Wireworld Starlight and I think I finally reached that point where I did address all those little things in a computer front that need to be dealt with to get some great results. It is funny that it took that one last component to finally get there. I read about it, and I have to say it's turned out to be true for me and urge people to put the effort in to everything before either writing it off or settling for average. Bryan

I should ask, is this even an issue? Maybe having lots of blue, inactive memory, means there is nothing to worry about. But there is that setting on the dial in PM that concerns me. I believe PM suggests setting it right below the green/blue level. Well, if the green keeps lowering, that setting isn't ideal according to the recommendation. Bryan

Just wondering if anyone has noticed this issue with memory play. Whenever I use itunes to jump to a new song (double click) the green available memory decreases. Every time. It just goes lower and lower. Consequently I end up with minimal available memory, less than what a song requires. I can take it down close to zero. This does not happen when I let songs progress without jumping. Restarting PM does not reset it. Using the reset in PM doesn't either. I have to reboot to get available memory back up. I do have 4GB or RAM. Bryan

I find PLAY a bit lean sounding. I would definitely take the time to convert from FLAC to AIFF and use something like itunes and pure vinyl or music. I'm using Max to convert 20,000 FLAC songs as I type this and it's not that big of a deal. Point and forget basically. Caveat being that Pure Vinyl and Pure Music integration with itunes player functionality is very buggy in memory play mode. If you're going to use a Mac server, I'd concert FLAC to something else.

Shig, I don't believe there is much audible differrence related to what type of drive interface you use or how fast the bus is. I believe that the idea is two fold. First is to isolate the music file storage from the OS local storage. This would prevent I/O contention. And most stock local OS drives are low quality so the less this drive does, the better. The second idea is to isolate the storage and DAC buses. If you have a USB DAC, go with a fireware disk. If you have a firewire DAC, go with USB storage. In theory, and by the sounds of what has been posted here, I should expect some nice results by moving the music files to external storage using firewire since my DAC is USB based. That's the big benefit. After that, I suspect tweaking things like what type of drive or how fast of a drive is really going to be next to no benefit. Bryan

Thanks for posting your experiences. I'll be switching to external storage for music files in the next few weeks and I'm hoping to experience results like you did. I wasn't sure what my first tweak on a stock Mac Mini would or should be. Upgrade from 2 to 4 GB of memory. External storage. SSD for the OS. I think I'll start with the external storage. Bryan

I'm saying don't spend thousands of dollars on the computer and especially more than one computer. I'd just get a Mini, load it up with memory, external storage, an audio player, and then put as much funds as possible in to the DAC including possibly upgrading your existing DAC. I have not heard the B, but have read enough about it that I felt it worth mentioning. It is your decision of course. Bryan