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In Reply to: RE: "germ free" posted by bullethead on July 24, 2017 at 18:29:31
Glad to hear this from you. Getting audionervosa since the Pi outbreak several months ago. Loving my W4S Connect though. Thinking about a dac upgrade.
Will
Follow Ups:
I use an Auralic Vega that was $2,500 used when it was $3,500 new. I see it is $2,700 or so new now, and excellent piece.It is crazy expensive but I think it would send you to another level.
I always think the sources are the first to be upgraded, including the interconnects, if you still use Mad Scientist Audio you should be set. If you want to be sent up the elevator look into a better DAC as a 10+ year investment like I do.
Edits: 07/24/17
What are you feeding the Vega with?
Will
Modded Sonos using Audioquest Diamond toslink cable into Vega.
Time to hijack Ivan's Thread...
Got the Vega
Let's talk about POWER CORD UPGRADES!
Will
I love gutwire power cables...
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too anal with the cleanliness, but most of us are careful not to cough on each other's gear.
Those little pucks you see sitting on the audiophile components?
They are not there to damp vibrations, they're for dispensing disinfectant. :-)
I am happy you found something that works for you.
The LMS platform still seems to be the swiss army knife of digital audio.
for music on TIDAL or QOBUZ so it's not a problem.
It WILL be a problem if I decide to subscribe to a 'Hi Rez' streaming site like QOBUZ Sublime+ as I don't think the QOBUZ player in LMS will handle it. I doubt the TIDAL player in LMS can decode MQA either.
Not a big deal as I think I can use the Meridian DAC on the output of the uRendu for that(if I even care).
The great thing about the uRendu is that I now have the option of spending even MORE money on ROON and HQPlayer, whatever they are. ;-)
'Cause that's how we 'audiophiles' roll!!!
Some DSP choices including certain on-the-fly sample rate conversions like PCM to DSD can be quite CPU intensive in Roon or HQPlayer. The heavy lifting CPU intensive conversions are done on your PC or Mac music server, not in the end-point. In this case it pays to have a somewhat hefty music server and not a stripped down low power pico PC or low-end Celeron or Atom based NUC device as your music server.
I've seen CPU and memory utilization go up significantly on my Mac Mini when running certain DSP conversions. Not all but some require a lot!! This is on my 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core-i7 Mini with 16GB RAM. Intel Celeron, Atom, Core i3, may not be sufficient depending on the DSP conversions you choose. Core i5 will be better, and i7 much better.
The good news for me was that HQPlayer integrates nicely with Roon. In other words, I can run HQPlayer AND Roon on my Mac Mini but 'hide' HQPlayer's ugly spartan library management interface and use Roon 'on top of it' instead. HQPlayer does all the signal processing behind the scenes but you use Roon as your front-end. Same if you're using the Roon App on a tablet like the iPad. You don't even see HQPlayer, just Roon. Think of HQPlayer as an on-the-fly sample rate converter including PCM to DSD, and it also handles multi-channel if that's your thing.
Roon also recently added DSP capability but I haven't experimented with it much. These days I'm not even running HQPlayer, just straight Roon.
But again, the end-point doesn't do the heavy lifting DSP work. That's done with HQPlayer and/or Roon running on the music server.
I have an IMac, 3.2-3.6 GH, never any conversion problems with DSD Upsampling, on HQ, AV+, Korg Audiogate.
16GB Ram, but the Processor speed is important, higher=better.
I will check on CPU utilization to see what I'm getting.
"I will check on CPU utilization to see what I'm getting."
It is interesting to monitor CPU utilization for different DSP settings. It can vary considerably and Activity Monitor will give you a good idea of what's going on. In general, slower* CPU's will show higher utilization. On CPU's with 'room to spare' the utilization numbers will be lower. As utilization goes up you may also notice your fan speed increase to keep the processor cool.
*It is a gross generalization to assume that faster clocked CPU's will always out perform slower ones. It really depends on many other factors like how the application is written. If the application is highly threaded and can execute over multiple cores and multiple threads, it will benefit from more cores even if those cores are clocked slower than another CPU with fewer cores. Actual throughput could be higher and not directly proportional to just CPU clock speed. Many older applications are 'single threaded' while newer ones maybe 'multi-threaded'. Some CPUs that run at faster clock speeds may have fewer cores than others that operate slower clock speeds.
In general, many older legacy applications run faster on faster clock CPU's and my not benefit from multiple core.
I think they are worth the upgrade IMHO. Both of them.
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