Tír Na HiFi

jrling wrote:I'll cancel my order of a Mac Mini then!

lol:)

"macs are very popular in the us its difficult for them to change :)"
By Nige

That is true, but I see that "Naim community" is heavily infected by macs too, which is mostly in UK. They seems to think, the nicer and most expensive, the better.
I personally haven't compared them, but I do trust to a few people, including Nige. So I don't have desire to go into that adventure, either, especially that I use PC full time at work.

I can confirm the view based on what I heard at Nigel's recently.
Maybe if someone had a tricked out mac mini to compare with a windows machine
that might be a fairer comparison.

Mac mini looks the biz and wife factor makes it a no brainer. Pair it with a Devialet
and sure you could put the hifi in a drawer. Couple it with speakers hidden in an outhouse
is nirvana for my boss. Perfect hifi unseen and hopefully no sounds

I have no problem with any of those, but "speakers hidden in an outhouse" would be challenging, if you still want some good sound...:)

tony wrote:I can confirm the view based on what I heard at Nigel's recently.
Maybe if someone had a tricked out mac mini to compare with a windows machine
that might be a fairer comparison.

thing is a mac mini or all newer macs are actually portable pc's since apple moved to intel cpus,

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+Min ... down/30410

and since pcs have moved to efi bios there even closer
thats why its never been easier to put mac os on a newish pc

so whats so radically different about a mac mini to make it sound better?

nige2000 wrote:

tony wrote:I can confirm the view based on what I heard at Nigel's recently.
Maybe if someone had a tricked out mac mini to compare with a windows machine
that might be a fairer comparison.

thing is a mac mini or all newer macs are actually portable pc's since apple moved to intel cpus,

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+Min ... down/30410

and since pcs have moved to efi bios there even closer
thats why its never been easier to put mac os on a newish pc

so whats so radically different about a mac mini to make it sound better?

I don't think it is the mini that is the differentiator for the reasons you say. It is just the closest Apple issue to a PC.

My point was that the differences are:
Audio stack in OS/X (based on Linux) v. Windows WDM-KS
Native support for UAC2
MQn v. Audirvana

My (ill-informed) view is that the Apple audio stack is potentially superior to WDM-KS. Integer and Direct Modes do seem to be getting as close to direct pass through as may be achievable in OS/X
Removing the need for another layer of proprietary driver by providing UAC2 support, has to be a good thing

So I am wondering if it is Audirvana that is causing the poor performance, whereas we know that MQn makes an incredible positive difference as we all have discovered? I presume you ran Audirvana with all Integer/Direct/Exclusive Modes turned on?

just done a audirvana bells whistles etc versus r2 + mqn on the macbook pro
mqn and r2 left mac OS X and audirvana in the dust
most noticeable is the higher noise floor then the lack of detail and dynamics
im not talking about a little difference its pretty huge
so i really don't think I've got it wrong:)

and yes i think audirvana is doing a good job on OS X especially with all the magic settings

your hard to convince:(
thats why i use mac os for emails and internet related stuff

macs are popular in the US as Mao is popular in China - cult of personality with the added panache of fashion accessory.

I have never understood the devotion.

sima66 wrote:

jrling wrote:As the thread seems to have gone rather quiet (except for noises of followers' computers crashing!), I found this article over on CA fascinating -
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f8-ge ... ers-18108/

Apologies if it is well known already, but Superdad's description of how he judges SQ was one of the best and most comprehensive that I have read.

Also his findings (albeit on a Mac Mini) on the sonic differences between playing music stored on different types of hard drives was fascinating - mainly that there was such a difference even when the track was in full memory play mode (in RAM) and theoretically therefore hard drive storage would not be accessed during play.

Has anyone tried creating a RAMDisk and running MQn and/or the music from RAMDisk - thereby completely enabling powering down of any onboard HDD whilst music is playing?

I had a RAMDISK and I didn't like it! It flattened the sound.
Some people had a different experience so is definitely worth to try!

After a bit of reading of this post, I can't agree that copied files sound the same. Even in the same SSD with clean power, I can still hear the difference between the original and the first copy.

the files are bit identical, what mechanism is at play ? you could copy the contents from one to the other, do they still sound the same ? If you duplicated them and played either both linear or non linear would you think they are different. I played each file in a loop via mqn and after a while couldn't differentiate between the linear and non linear.