Garf

I just finished setting up my NUC 7th Gen i5 yesterday. Fast delivery from Amazon, I got it Wednesday when I ordered it over the weekend. I was also a bit annoyed with the fan. I figured it would do until my fanless case arrived. I also ordered a Akasa Plato X7 at the same time, they said it would arrive March 26-April 5th. Seeing that it was coming over the pond from GB, I decided I could wait a bit. I was shocked to find a FedEx delivery person at the door with the case today, one day after receiving and assembling the NUC kit. So I disconnected things and jumped in. The instructions supplied with the case were a bit sparse, and I left the battery in place. The motherboard did have a bit of a hump at the one side by the battery, but some careful pressure seemed to set things in place. I did not check the contact of the CPU to the aluminum block on the case, due to the contact pad but I assume the computer will let me know if it is getting too warm, lol. Normally I would set the heatsink, then remove it and check for sufficient spread of the thermal paste. If good, add a bit more thermal paste and move on. One tip, the case I ordered apparently doesn't do wifi. There are antennae holes on the case, but I saw nothing about wifi in the instructions. When disconnecting the mb from the NUC kit case, I had to remove two wires that snaked around to the top of the case. I was using wifi to control the Roon Rock server, and when I powered things up and couldn't reach it, I knew what I missed in the installation. It was easy enough to find a long network cable (read: dig in a closet for 10 mins), snake it around a tall bookshelf that was anchored to the wall (allowing me to dust the top of it, which apparently I had been neglecting for a few years), and wire up a CAT5 connection to a nearby phone jack (glad my place was wired with CAT5 cable 12 years ago). Using a network cable also will allow a lot of flexibility in the future if I start to take advantage of the Tidal or network streaming. That LED is really bright. You said that there is a BIOS setting for that? That stinks, I have to hook up a monitor and keyboard again if I wanted to turn it off. I think I will go with some sort of dimming opaque material that I can apply over the LED. Having run a headless LINUX system, as well as a CAPS system a while back, I know there will be a time soon when I will have to drag out a keyboard and monitor to fix something. Then I can disable that LED and wifi in the BIOS.

Using a WASAPI with a Schiit Bifrost directly connected to the tablet, with a USB SSD attached. It should work with the Schiit supplied drivers.

i browsed this thread the other night, and didn't see this mentioned. Due to the European Commission anti-trust ruling, MS has to offer N (European) and KN (Korean) versions of Windows 10. These versions have media apps removed, media player, music, video, voice recorder and Skype. Less installed is always good. I will attempt an installation on my Surface Pro 2 tablet, I have freed up 112gb into an empty partition, keeping my existing windows installation. I often pop my tablet off its dock after it is done playing music for the day, to read on my Kindle and catch up on forum posts. I also take this tablet when I am playing my mandolin, as it has my PDFs on it. Dual boot the OS will be nice. I will be attempting an installation of Roon Rock on this partition first. I expect it to fail spectacularly, but hey, who knows. A tablet isn't that far off from a NUC hardware wise. And I might learn something in the process. If it doesn't succeed, I will be giving Windows 10 Pro N a try.

PonoMusic | Store There should be a square labeled "PONOMUSIC WORLD" with a Download Now button on the bottom right, scroll past the music selections.

So copying files degrades SQ, but having a blu-ray on your playback machine and all the overhead to support burning in your music server doesn't?

1. A quality recording 2. Money to buy #1 3. Time to find #1 4. Time to listen to #1 5. Some sort of system to spin the bits The more I spend on equipment, the more I find that the system isn't as important as the music put into it.

I upgraded to a Lyr 2 from my Asgard. Enjoying some things, and not some others. Love the pre-amp out, it is the main reason I bought this. Will let it burn in a bit, and revisit some of my music. It seems to like to be let loose, with headphones on I am listening to rather loud Goo Goo Dolls Magnetic, Nirvana In Utero, LZ I, II, III, Dire Straits Love Over Gold, Tom Petty Damn The Torpedos. Paper Airplane never sounded better. Folk and acoustic works, awesome. Classical and Jazz piano, real nice. Definitely more revealing, I will have to readjust the bar on what I consider a good recording now. Revisiting some of my favorites, and issues with the recording are more apparent (Moondance, some of Tea For the Tillerman, the "darker" sounding songs on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, August and Everything After). Time to take the headphones off, my ears are sore. Gary

Hey KingCrimson, yes, absolutely it would run off a tablet with an i5, assuming you can load the software of course. From the Intel i5 8gb hints, I assume it is a Microsoft based tablet? I am running a MS Surface Pro tablet with jRiver, sounds wonderful. My CAPS 2.0 is gathering dust in the closet. I have heavily modified the services running on it, based on the CAD scripts (you can find here under the server forum). It is an original Surface Pro with 4gb of RAM, 128gb SSD and a 128gb SD card. I am not lacking for space, and I can always pull from wifi if I need (I push music files to it over wifi while I am listening). I would not be concerned with the processor, it doesn't lack power. I even convert DSD to 24/192 on playback, no problems at all in jRiver. I also have a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 I carry with me to and from work, it is my mobile music platform, development and general use ultrabook/tablet. Not in anyway optimized for music, but it still sounds nice. My work environment doesn't warrant a dedicated music server I love the tablet, it fixes the headless display issue with the CAPS servers (you don't miss a display until you need one), and can run on battery power, or plugged in.

Yep. I listened to this last week when I got the email, I passed until I can see DR data, as it seemed overly loud.

I wouldn't say it is an HDTrack improvement, but an overall improvement in the hires field. As Cat says, they can only pass along the "message". I chuckle when people get all up in arms and attempt to shoot the messenger when a bad recording slips through. As a whole, I do see a trend, with improvements in hi-res recordings. Less highly compressed, fatiguing releases. I think there are better tools, better work flows, and more engineers/producers who "get" hires. Dare I say the field of hires recordings is maturing?

+1

I have absolutely no problems accessing files over wifi. I use the single USB 3.0 for the external DAC. The onboard DAC is decent and can output 24/96 through headphone jack, but doesn't compare to an external DAC with this setup.

CAPS with SOtM card. I have not put it through the paces in a critical listening session (headphones on, with more complicated music), I will let you know my impressions. Swapping from CAPS to an un-optimized Surface to attempt to A/B test is what initially lead me to do a full optimization of Windows 8.1. Unplugging my USB cable from SOtM card to Surface several times caused my CAPS server to become unstable. I had to disassemble the CAPS and re-seat the card to get the server to recognize it.

I shoot also, cameras that is. I have a Nikon D7100, and take awful pictures that in no way justify the expense for the camera and lenses I have purchased. I value quality at a reasonable price, I do not purchase ridiculously priced lenses. Kind of like computer audio now that I think of it...

Was the water damage due to your apartment, or a unit above? Hope you are all dried out! Regards, Gary