MadCow

Ruark Audio MR1 Mk2 supports optical, Bluetooth and regular aux input. Can be used as a speaker pair, or just a single mono unit. Optional battery pack. Audio Pro Addon C10 does Wifi, Bluetooth, Ethernet LAN and has RCA connections. No battery though, that's in the smaller C3 model.

Missed this topic the first time around, but typically in this order depending on availability: 1) HDTracks 2) Bandcamp 3) Tidal (Qobuz, et al are not available in my region.) Though reading what people are commenting about HDTracks' redownload policy, I guess I'm going to swap #1 and #2 from now onwards.

Ugh, I hope this (Sony) stays solely on Tidal and doesn't bleed into other places, like HDTracks.

Ah right... when I read @jcbenten's post I must have had a brain fart and assumed it did not have any digital inputs at all.

Here's the way I see it: regardless of which option you go with, you will still need a DAC in order to utilize the digital output from your player. Otherwise your Marantz amp isn't going to accept anything digital on its own. The reason I suggested a player/phone + portable USB DAC is so that you could use it for both gym and home... but I suppose you could just go with either Fiio or iBasso, and just carry the player for gym use, but then get a much better DAC for home use with the Marantz amp.

I'd love a DAP with digital out also, but I think most (all?) of them have gone the way of the dodo, which is sad 😢 Instead of a dedicated DAP, how about a decent Android smartphone paired with a small/portable USB DAC instead? Use the USB Audio Player Pro app to bypass the limitations of Android's default sound driver and you're good to go!

I'm not aware of any decent "sound cards" in this time of age... Creative Sound Blaster is still kicking in some regions of the world, but they're more gaming-focused than audiophile-centric, if you know what I mean. But in case you aren't aware, any USB DAC or audio interface is, for all practical purposes, is a USB sound card. I checked out the specs of your V5AP and apparently it only takes USB and 3.5mm aux. Have you tried USB first, to see if it works with your computer? Otherwise, most DACs have RCA output so you'd need the common 3.5mm aux to RCA cable to make the connection. Maybe a Cambridge Audio DacMagic 100? But if you prefer a simple 3.5mm aux-to-aux cable instead, then maybe something like a Schiit Fulla or Hel?

I'm curious if anyone has done the opposite of the above? e.g. have a person describe what to hear from one set of cables as compared to another, then pretend to fidget at the back of the amplifier but never actually swapped any cables, and record the responses/results from the audience? - i.e. reproducing a similar situation as the OP. I imagine, on a larger scale, that this test could be done similar to how vaccine trials are done - in half the test group, an actual cable swap occurs and in the other "placebo" group, no actual cable swap is done. Though I'm no statistician, I'll leave it to more qualified people to determine how to interpret any results from such an experiment.

Yes, that is my concern as well, which is why I posted earlier in this thread:

@#Yoda# already mentioned above, Tidal also has a store at http://store.tidal.com/ (but afaik their FLACs only go up to CD quality, so not exactly what you're looking for).

Sure, but that doesn't really help if the album you're looking for isn't there, is it? I mean, for me, HDTracks is my first go-to place. If what I want isn't there, I check Bandcamp next. If not, then Tidal is my last resort. But more often than not I end up at Tidal. Other places (like Qobuz, etc) aren't available in my country.

I was going to start a new thread asking about this very topic, until I noticed you already have an answer here. But I wonder if anyone wants to go into this further - is there a way to be sure? Or at the very least, maybe reduce the chances of getting an MQA, like say... avoid buying anything published under Warner? As a side note, searching around the Internet, I found this tool and ran a quick check over some of my Tidal FLACs. They came back negative. I don't know how reliable the check is though, and even if it is reliable, but it's still certainly not a viable solution to find out only after you've paid for and downloaded the music.

Wow, I haven't been here for ages (last time I was here, this site was called The Computer Audiophile - which made me scratch my head wondering if I was receiving spam or something), and today the PM spam message brought me back. 😅 Have to say PM spam is a pretty common annoyance especially on larger forums. Many thanks to the admin for cleaning this up so quickly, by the time I logged in to check, the message was gone. Also wanted to comment, a lot of forums these days tend to have restrictions on new users, like not being able to post links or images until they have at least 10 or more posts, minimum time between each PM, and so on. I suppose the "first post needs approval" here works if the forum isn't too busy, compared to the more automated minimum-posts-to-do-anything-significant rule, but just throwing this suggestion on the table in case it may be useful.

Had a similar issue with my 2009 Mac Mini -> Samsung tv. VGA connection shows the image properly, but with some annoying "resolution not supported" overlay that wouldn't go away. I never figured it out, but I switched to using a DVI-to-HDMI adapter and never looked back.

Hard crashes are more often than not due to hardware or drivers, and not software. Therefore my suspicion is one (or both) of your RAM sticks are faulty. The reason you may be getting the crash after increasing RAM usage in PM is that after PM takes up that amount of RAM, other apps are forced to use up the other 5GB (some of which may be faulty).