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Touch optimizations

Posted by John Swenson (A) on November 28, 2010 at 18:00:12

In Reply to: A Dilemma That I Am Looking For Help With posted by Astroimage on November 28, 2010 at 08:46:25:

I'm going to come at this from a very different approach than others and give you some options for optimizing the Touch. You can get quite a bit better sonics than what you are getting right now.

First off is to use an external server. I know you like the drive plugged into the Touch, but it is not the best configuration for sonics. It severely stresses that little processor to have both the server and the player going on at the same time. There are quite a few inexpensive options for a "server box", you don't need a full blown normal "computer" with screen and all.

To try it out to see if you hear an improvement you can temporarily load SBS on your existing computer, plug your external drive into it and point SBS at that drive. To get best results from this you should be wired to the Touch, not wifi. The usual way is to wire the server to a router as well as the Touch. Its best if they are NOT in the same room. (thats one of the advantages of the SB system, the server can be off some where else out of the listening environment)

Once you get it running, set the file types so that any compressed types such as FLAC are converted to PCM before streaming to the Touch. Wavs are fine since they are already PCM.

The purpose of all this is to cut down on the work the Touch processor has to do.

There are other configuration tweaks that can be done on the Touch. Soundchekk has a list of them on his website. (it also includes what I have listed here). Do these first, then go after the others.

Another improvement for many people is to replace the switching supply with a good linear supply. I have posted a design here on AA which can significantly improve the performance of a system. Contrary to popular opinion most of the advantage of the linear supply is not making the Touch work better, but decreasing the noise that gets fed back into the powerline. The design I mentioned feeds back almost nothing in the mains. Many other pieces of gear are fairly susceptible to the noise range that a switcher produces, thus getting rid of the switcher can improve the rest of your system. Some gear is not sensitive to this noise and the linera supply does not give nearly as big an improvement as it does in other systems.

There ARE two hardware tweaks which can improve it, one is to get rid of the output caps, there are completely unnecessary, the DAC already produces a ground referenced signal. The other is to unplug the screen. Of course then you need to use some other form of running the system (of which there are MANY).

If you try running with an external server and you like the improvement there are a number of possible "server boxes", what you get depends on your priorities. The easiest to use and setup is a vortexbox appliance. Plug it in, copy files over to its disk, log into it from another computer and run a scan and you are ready to go. It does take twenty watts so some people don't like it. A FitPC2 running vortexbox software can do the same thing, but it uses 5 watts and is extremely small and quiet. You do have to install vortexbox software though, which takes about 10 minutes.

Once you get the SB system going it tends to multiply. The server can send music to many players and virtual players. You can control them from many different devices, not just the players themselves. Its easy to get hooked on the system.

If you DO decide to go with an external DAC for the Touch, my favorite these days is the Audio-gd DAC1-9DSP. This is one amazing DAC. Even with an external DAC I still recommend an external server for the Touch. The TinySBS in the Touch has a lot of things turned off to make it fit. With an external server you get the full power of the system.

John S.

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