strat95

Great review on what sounds like a great product. Any chance you can review the Ideon Audio Absolte DAC? It comes as standalone or can play as a 3 box combo (DAC, Stream, & Time). It has received rave reviews elsewhere and one reviewer at Absolute Sound bought it. Would love to hear your review of it. "Listening to the competitor, you knew you were hearing an outstanding piano recording. With the Ideon, you could believe you were hearing a piano." "But the fact remains that this is a world-class digital-to-analog converter, and even something of a bargain compared to its most elite competitors. There may be no sunroof or heated front seats, but Ideon’s Absolute DAC is a no-compromise piece of audio gear. In a good way, which is why I’m buying one."

Chris, any chance of testing the QNAP in this manner with a video card to see if it performs better?

Would running a Windows virtual machine on the qnap change that dynamic?

So adding a video card in the Qnap is far different than adding a better video card in a PC like the CAPS 20? The Qnap can't use the video card for any of the DSP functions?

Chris, The Qnap unit you reviewed gives one the option to also install a video card. Would doing so make it more responsive when pushing the limits in the way you are using it? There is also another more expensive qnap series, the TVS-1282 that comes with an Intel i7 processor.

Commensurate works better than commiserate.

Yup, that's the one. Thanks Chris, I thought it was on this thread from the Front Page.

Chris, I had a lengthy post in this thread that is now missing! Why is that? Have any others noticed their post go missing in these forums?

Tidal is a business and like any business the principal owners are interested in making a profit. This is no different than public corporations that typically have a primary interest to make money for their shareholders. Here is a good article that raises some valid questions about the new Jay-Z run Tidal music streaming service. Jay Z's New Music Streaming Service Tidal Has Many Flaws | The New Republic Jay-Z is very good at presenting an image. The initial video clip released shows nothing more than all the artists involved walking into a Tidal round table meeting: It's a clever video that creates hype and attracts the adoring masses to their favorite popular artists being shown. Most of the artists shown are the most popular and biggest selling artists within their genre and sub genre (note: U2 was not there likely due to ties to Apple) and we're told that 16 of them were each given a 3% stake in Tidal (Alicia Keys, Arcade Fire, Beyoncé, Calvin Harris, Chris Martin, Deadmau5, Daft Punk, Jack White, Jason Aldean, J. Cole, Jay Z, Kanye West, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Usher). It is always the case that business owners put their own interests first above and beyond all others. Let's call it survival of the fittest. Jay-Z and his 16 co-owners are sure to benefit far more than any of the smaller artists being signed to Tidal, as they should since they are the owners. Already, iOS purchasers of Tital will be dinged an extra 30% if their purchase is made via the Apple App store. This surcharge shows the business wars that are happening between corporations and will surely secure more money in the hands of Tidal owners and less in the hands of Apple with respect to Tidal subscriptions. Star power seems to be at an all time high today. We see fashion designers using actors in their print advertisements instead of models. We see athletes being used in advertisements for soft drinks and watches. We see artists using their twitter accounts to advertise product to their millions of followers. Today, with Tidal, we are seeing musicians in the upper echelon of the music business selling us a music streaming service. This proposed message harkens back to the days when real music lovers were running record labels instead of accountants as is so common today. That era spawned a lot of fantastic music that mirrored a social consciousness. It was an era when art imitated life. That era of music still has the power to attract younger listeners of today because the messages they deliver still ring true. As much as Tidal's new ownership appears to be promoting music and artists, the artists representing Tidal appear to be more interested with life imitating art. If that is not true, with all the conflicts taking place in our world, where is all the protest music? It's rather incredible and disturbing. Online digital music stores such as iTunes have existed for some time now with a specific model. Each $.99 song sold equates to about $.70 to $.75 for the record label, about $.15 to $.20 for Apple, with the remainder going to the artist. Popular established artists with large music sales of CDs have had the negotiating power to squeeze more than the 5 or 10 cents normally allotted to smaller artists. In the iTunes model, each unit sold to each customer directly compensates the artist. This is also true of the physical sales of CD and vinyl. This is NOT the case for streaming services. The current streaming model offers subscribers the ability to stream an unlimited amount of music from a selection of millions of songs in the lossy mp3 format for $10 per month (Tidal now offers lossless for $20 per month). Billboard recently altered its charting rules to account for streamed content for charting purposes, where 1500 streams amounts to a purchase, thus affecting chart positions and influence on the general public. http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/billboard-shift-streams-helps-ariana-hurts-industry-article-1.2041041 In an interesting case a band figured out how to make money from Spotify by streaming silence. The band released short clips of silence and asked fans to stream them repeatedly overnight. How to make money from Spotify by streaming silence | Music | The Guardian We have read many stories of the pittance of cash being paid to artists, even well known artists such as Barbra Streisand, via songs played by these streaming services. A few of these popular artists have chosen to pull their catalogs of music from these streaming services in protest. That is because the current streaming model does not make any economic sense for smaller artists and even some larger artists. Currently there is no other business model to choose from in the streaming realm and most artists have no choice but to join rather than risk not joining and not be heard. Artists are not typically savvy business individuals able to weave the legalese of a binding contract and thus are taken advantage of often unaware. The problem with streaming services is how the pool of money collected from subscribers is distributed to artists. All monthly fees paid by subscribers are lumped together to pay out artists based on total streams played by all subscribers. This model does not correlate with past models. If in a single month I use my $10 account to stream music from a single new artist I have discovered, my $10 should only compensate the single artist I listened to. This is similar to making a purchase of a physical product such as a CD. My $10 should not be used to pay artists that other subscribers have listened to but that is exactly what happens in the streaming model. This creates a huge and significant imbalance that favors popular artists. To demonstrate, if a streaming service consists of only 2 subscribers and subscriber A only listens to 100 Led Zeppelin songs in a given month while subscriber B only listens to Britney Spears in a given month but listens to 10,000 songs, pooling total streams by all subscribers and pooling money from all subscribers creates a huge imbalance. Subscriber A only listened to Led Zeppelin and all of their $10 should be allotted to them. Likewise subscriber B only listed to Britney Spears and even though they listened 100 time more than subscriber A, $10 should only be allotted to Britney Spears. That is in fact what each subscriber used. Instead, the current streaming model would lump the $20 together and pay out to artists based on percentage of total streams. Therefore in the example given Led Zeppelin would be allotted about 1% of $20 whereas Britney Spears would be allotted 99% of the $20 collected from all subscribers! Even if streams are tracked and paid out on subscriber by subscriber basis, another problem still exists. The traditional models of CD purchases and digital file purchases allow you to listen to a purchased product as much as you like. A payment for a CD or digital download means you own it and you are free to listen to only the music in that purchase as often as you wish. Comparatively, the streaming music model allows you to rent the entire music store for a monthly fee less than the price of a CD. As a subscriber you are free to listen as much as you like but the more you listen the smaller portion artists receive from your fraction of your monthly subscription price. In an environment where internet connections are uncapped and streaming services become more ubiquitous and more heavily used by each subscriber, the payout to all parties (record label, distributor, artist) diminishes with the artist suffering the most. Effectively, if a subscriber listens to more than one CD worth of music over the course of the month, the streaming model is putting less money in the artists' pockets than non streaming services. The above examples demonstrate the problems with the current music streaming models and why smaller artists are doomed to be enslaved by it and become extinct because of it. Technology is advanced enough to track individual subscriber usage and pay out artists based on individual subscriber usage but that will not solve the problem. The music streaming model by design rewards popular artists in an unfair and unbalanced way. It is no doubt convenient for a streaming subscriber to have a library of millions of songs at their fingertips for $10 or $20 dollars a month. However, the current structure of the music streaming model guarantees and ensures that only mainstream artists will flourish and smaller artists will not. This is not at all encouraging for music lovers who listen outside of the mainstream. In fact, when you break it down this way, it is a method of controlling the industry and the music within it by a select few. TV

The article is written describing the Beaglebone and a device to stream to a USB DAC. If the application does not involve a USB DAC can the HDMI output be used to connect to the RCA input on a preamp? Has anyone tried this and how is the sound quality? Thanks, T

"The Computer Audiophile 100 is a playlist of music that I use for evaluating components at home and at audio shows." Californication?! You're off your rocker Chris. The album Californication ranks sonically as one of the worst popular recordings due to it's extremely hot mastering and overuse of compression.

I read in another forum elsewhere that the coolest thing about CES won't be discussed until March and to forget everything you know about music servers and delivery of computer audio files.... No more info was revealed but it is from someone in the biz. Any ideas what he may be referring to? Is it Sooloos?

Chris, your site is still messed up regarding number of posts shown when logged in vs. logged out. The counter at the top of the page for this article always shows 23 comments. The home page lists 37 comments. When logged out and on the article page 37 comments are visible. When logged in only 26 comments are visible. This makes it impossible to respond to the missing comments especially if you want to quote what someone else has written.

Everything I am reading about RAID 5 says it's slower than RAID 0. I did err in including RAID 1 in my first comment. TV

Straight from Adaptec's site: Adaptec - Which RAID Level is Right for Me? You do not get more performance boost from RAID 5 (RAID 10 perhaps) compared to RAID 0 or RAID 1. There is more computing overhead to stripe data across drives in a 3+ drive RAID array. You take a hit on writing data. And as Ted B mentions, RAID should never be considered a method of backup.