larryb

I'm looking for hardware that will support more than the three stooges in the title. I stream from Idagio a lot, also from Amazon, and am thinking of adding Presto. I have an Innuos server which supports 2.5 of the three (Spotify through LMS/spotty). I love the sound, but: While there has been talk of supporting Idagio, they seem to be backing away from that. Now I stream to an old Macbook Pro, thence to my DAC (Auralic Vega) and onward. I tried Qobuz on a trial both on Innuos and on my Mac - the difference is day and night. So I need a solution: I don't want stuff decoded, etc., in whatever noisy, high-latency computer I might have lying around. What's out there that actually sounds like dedicated audio equipment and supports more than the stooges? My price top is somewhere in the 3-5 range, but I don't mind hearing about the higher end. Who knows, my wife may surprise me...

Idagio - redbook streaming last I heard. Also, I think the library is not as good, but since they overlap but don’t nest, that’s a matter of taste.

You genius, AudioDoctor, it was Yate!! (Pronounced Yaté, but Siri insisted on calling it Yate to rhyme with late (and which Safari insists on autocorrecting to. Anyone know anything better?

I am looking for an Mac id3 tag editor that can do bulk edits, the ability to write scripts, etc. I had one once but the computer disappeared, and it had a funny name that I cannot recall. Just to rule out a few things, not MusicBrainz Picard, not mp3tag, not kid3 or amvidia, which all fail in different ways. I am happy to pay through the nose for the right one.

Don't count on Primephonic integration unless Innuos gives up on LMS. I wrote to Primephonic about this, and they said something to the effect that LMS integration was not a priority for the coming year. I read that to mean that the sentence would be equally true if year became years. Someone at Innuos told me they reached out to Primephonic, and that Primephonic are really dedicated to their web interface. This seems to me to be a remarkably stupid strategy for a service that trumpets their hi-res flacs. Perhaps someone can explain it to me.

I too took advantage of the Primephonic discount. I'm happy with the quality of the sound and I love the search. But (like Idagio too) I cannot feed it through my Innuos Zenith to my dac. They seem to be wedded to their web interface, with no plans to extend to LMS (which the Innuos server uses). So I have a vintage 2013 Mac Air sitting on top of my DAC just for Primephonic. Spotify premium has worse sound and nearly useless search, but it does have Spotty for LMS.

If you're happy with the Faust-Melnikov collaboration you should (if you haven't already) check out Queyras-Melnikov Beethoven cello/piano sonatas. I heard them in concert in a very intense space in Berlin, and was sufficiently moved that I bought their recording. It does not disappoint.

I have one of these, and it sounds lovely whenever Audirvana Plus 2.09 finds it. Unfortunately, about 50% of the time Audirvana never "initializes" this device. DB2 with iTunes sounds quite decent for the office, but when it works, DB2 Audirvana sounds significantly better, as good as any office/kitchen type of system I've ever owned does.

Thanks, Firedog. My nightstand is small, so every now and then the SB get's knocked to the floor, etc. After the last time, groping for glasses in the dark, I realized that the stock of SB's will never grow. The SBR replacement has problems. (I did a firmware upgrade, then reverted.) I don't recall all of them, but two are: a) you need a permanent internet connection even when playing your own music, and b) you can't construct a playlist on the thing (and I can give you a story for why this is important). I have an Alix board and I like mpd with the mpad client more than iTunes with Remote. I had thought of this, but connecting with ssh from my ipad to set the alarm using at or cron seemed excessively geeky. Doable, though. I was just hoping for something more elegant.

of course, but they (the Tivoli products I looked at, for instance) are limited to playing what's on the ipod. I want to stream to the alarm. That's the problem.

I wake up every morning to news on my Squeezebox Radio alarm, and listen to music while reading in bed before I go to sleep. The Squeezebox won't last forever, so I'm looking for a replacement and I need some suggestions. My criteria are the following: 1. No more that two physical boxes, counting the speakers, and I don't want to have a laptop in the bedroom (as opposed to, say, an ipad). 2. Play internet radio from the web. Pandora, MOG etc. perhaps nice but not at all necessary. 3. Play music from my library, which currently sits on a NAS. The library is served to my main system by (for the moment) iTunes on an old Macbook Pro, and is served to the Squeezebox by Squeezebox Server on the same machine. (At some point I would like to go back to a small, dedicated linux box, but I upgraded my Wyred 4 Sound DAC1 for HR, and the DAC now requires special drivers, and they don't have Linux versions.) 4. If the device played white noise or music on a timer, that would be a plus. 5. The alarm function must play internet radio off a playlist I provide (as opposed to the urls iTunes provides, which are often out of date and not for the right stations. I currently wake up to an NPR station one timezone behind mine, since the local sometimes has no available connections. I had envisioned, for instance, streaming to my ipad and then playing on a peachtree audio deepblue (overkill), but I can't find alarm clock apps that can play music streamed from an offboard library and/or radio from a url. A box which feeds the deepblue with an ipad controller is three boxes. I really don't need sound as good as deepblue either. Ideas?

@Paul: Before my Alix I had an old mac Powerbook. Music sounded muddier to me than with the Alix board. At the moment I'm using that mac's replacement (which itself was just recently replaced), with 10.7, but I've not yet had the time for careful listening. If I stay with this, I'd like to turn lots of stuff off; e.g., run it headlessly, turn off lots of system services. Do you know of a list of what's safe to axe? (I realize we're drifting here.) I could also put mpd on the laptop with macports. That would be a fun experiment. @Chris: This will be a fun experiment too. Thanks.

W4S modified it for 24/192. (At 24/96 it all worked out of the box). Are you referring to the "snd-usb-asyncaudio Linux compliant" driver found on the m2tech hiface web page (http://www.m2tech.biz/hiface.html)?

I have a modded Wyred4Sound DAC1.

@iago: Too bad for me, since I have an Alix. I thought about the Mac Mini, but it doesn't fit my aesthetic of minimality, and although I am a Mac user, the mini systems I've heard just don't sound that great to me. @Audio_Elf: Yeah, this is where I'm going to end up. I've opened old Dells to put in disk drives and replace power supplies, but I've never put one together from scratch. Could be fun, could be costly. @Krisbee: Of course! That's why I had an Alix with voyage linux to begin with. (And before I did Macs, I had a NeXT Cube, and before that, linux laptops. Ever ask a hotel desk clerk what the subnet mask is?) mpd on the Alix sounds much better than anything I've tried on my Air and Powerbook Pro.I have a new DAC with Asynch USB, and it has drivers only for Macs and Windows. So my wife, a luddite who works and there lives 200 miles away, is getting the Alix and an iPad 1 with mPad, and I have to start over again. This will be an adventure.