ATTENTION Current Mac mini/A+ users: Boot Mavericks from an SD card, load a RAMdisk, dismount your internal SATA drives, and pour a drink for the musicians walking out of your speakers!

[bobfa]

3 hours ago, Superdad said:

 

Strangely they do.  I used to discourage JS-2/MMK buyers who were using their computers just to feed their network renderers (Rendus, sMS-200, etc.), but so many have bought anyways and reported terrific results.  

I have a current generation Mac mini that I have modded and it made a huge difference to my system.  Including direct USB (well almost) and with the SOTM or the Sonor gear.  I also have my DAC run off of the JS-2.

[Advieira]

21 hours ago, Superdad said:

 

Strangely they do.  I used to discourage JS-2/MMK buyers who were using their computers just to feed their network renderers (Rendus, sMS-200, etc.), but so many have bought anyways and reported terrific results.  

 

JS2 is so good as they say? Wouldnt be enough a good LPS to have great improvements? Or the differences are only subtle?

[appledave]

On 1/20/2018 at 10:58 AM, Pascal64 said:

Hi there, 

still on USB port #3 on Mac mini Late 2012

(and OS X Maverick with Audirvana 2.6.8 and CAD scripts)

 

It's been a while since I followed this thread, but I'm in the process of creating a new SD Card as I'm migrating from a 2011 i5 MacMini with a dud video card to an identical model I found used (simple RAM and HDD swap).

 

Is Maveriks the preferred SQ version of OS X over Yosemite?  I seem to recall some chatter about how Yosemite was slightly better the last time I created a bootable SD Card; and have been using this setup the whole time.  (I'm not going High Seirra).

 

BTW my personal best results was Booting from SD, ejecting the SATA Drive, and playing the application from the RAM Drive.  Personally I found playing the tracks direct from the NAS preferable to moving the data to a second RAM Drive, but to each his own.  The application files definitely preferred from the RAM Drive rather than the SD.

 

David Engel. 

 

Also just sold my Emotiva XDA-1 for an Oppo 105D so it's time to re-evaluate!!

[pixelphoto]

Which is port #3? Facing the Mac Mini is it from left to right or right to left?

[appledave]

2 minutes ago, pixelphoto said:

Which is port #3? Facing the Mac Mini is it from left to right or right to left?

 

Port 1 is on the outer edge of the mini furthest away from the power supply.  4 is the closet in the centre, so 3 would be the second from the middle.  Personally I find the outer port 1 the best to use.

DE.

[pixelphoto]

Thank you appledave!

[kennyb123]

I recently ran into some flakiness with playback from Roon.  Swapping SD cards resolved this unexpectedly.  Details here:

 

 

[astrostar59]

I finally got round to running the Audirvana+ 3 app on a Ram disc. It is better, no idea why at the moment. The app is doing its task, but it needs the system resources as well doesn't it? My Mac Mini is headless, and I screen share to my iMac. The Mac Mini is late 2014, has SSD 250 meg, 8 meg RAM, Uptone Audio MMK mod and a HD Plex LPS. My music is on an external D2 Firewire connected drive, also powered of the LPS.

 

The jump running A+ on the Ram disc is the treble, is is cleaner and less noise in it. At first I was fooled, thinking I had lost some details, but it was a false friend, the details were slightly exaggerated leading edges and low level coarseness. It is subtle, and can hear it on my LCD4s, and on my speakers when I play them loud. But it is worth the small hassle of creating the Ram disc. I had to reload the music library, only took 5 minutes. I don't power the Mac Mini down much, but to recreate the Ram disc and reload the app takes 1 minute. And opening up it found the second re-imported library right away. 

 

So a great upgrade for FREE - Like it!

 

[abulr]

Does the speed of the SD Card matter if you're just running the OS off it? (And not playing music off it)?

[abulr]

Wrt RAMDisk, isn't all data loaded to RAM before playing? If so, is there really a difference between creating a RAMDisk and moving files there or having your app load into memory, load subsequent audio file into memory, and then playing it from there?

Also, if Ramdisk is such a great improvement to SQ, I have trouble believing that better Audio Players don't do this behind the scenes?

Thanks

[Superdad]

10 minutes ago, abulr said:

Does the speed of the SD Card matter if you're just running the OS off it? (And not playing music off it)?

 

Not that I have found, though I admit to not having compared many SD cards of differing speeds.  I still have a fast Toshiba EXCERIA card sitting unopened on my desk.

 

1 minute ago, abulr said:

Wrt RAMDisk, isn't all data loaded to RAM before playing? If so, is there really a difference between creating a RAMDisk and moving files there or having your app load into memory, load subsequent audio file into memory, and then playing it from there?

 

While A+ and some other players do preload tracks to RAM, I can assure you that there is, for some unknown-to-me reason a sonic difference from creating a RAMdisk and playing the tracks from there.

 

1 minute ago, abulr said:

Also, if Ramdisk is such a great improvement to SQ, I have trouble believing that better Audio Players don't do this behind the scenes?

 

A+ (at least the old non-library, drag-and-drop tracks version I used to use) allows you to drag in a window the same track stored in multiple locations.  And when you play each identically named instance of the track, it plays it from those corresponding storage locations.  So this makes for very easy blind A/B comparison.  And I have done this.

 

For example, I showed my son the exact same track copied into 4 locations:  1) Shared hard drive attached to the iMac on my desk that I used for control of my optimized, DAC-connected mini; 2) SATA drive internal to the DAC-connected mini; 3) SD card in the mini; 4) RAM disk of the mini. I showed him how to drag each of those track instances into the A+ player window, and asked him to do so in random order while I was out of the room.  When I came back, there was no way to know where each instance was located.  I then went back and forth among them and made notes as to which (top to bottom on the list of 4) sounded best.  One was stellar and easy to pick out, two were near identical, one was the least among them.

Once I was done, to reveal which instance was which, I deleted the tracks at their sources, one at a time and then looked to see which one on the list would not play (trying to play it would just make A+ skip to the next on the list). The stellar track was the RAM disk-located one, the two that pretty much tied were the SD card and network-shared drive, and the one that fell short was the internal SATA drive.

 

So do some experimenting and listening and let us know what you hear! 

[abulr]

4 minutes ago, Superdad said:

So do some experimenting and listening and let us know what you hear! 

Trust me - this is my plan for the upcoming weekend!

[alsterfan]

1 hour ago, Superdad said:

 

The stellar track was the RAM disk-located one

It was about 5 1/2 years ago that I was lucky to "meet" Superdad when he opened this thread. Nearly all of his proposals I tested with the result that I am still using an

- SD card for MacOS

- a RAM disc being created on every boot of the OS using a script that Jud - as far as I can remember - once has written. In order to keep things easy to handle I only use A+ within the RAM disc. However you are free to also copy music into it once you have attributed sufficient RAM to the disc.

As to abulr´s question concerning the importance of speed of the SD card:

A long time ago I compared a few cards, the outcome of which was, that

- higher speed was more comfortable (concerning booting time) but at the expense of shifting the sound a bit more to the "digital", harsher side. "Slower" cards sound a bit more analogue, warmer.

- Another aspect touched the "golden" contacts on the back. To my ears those cards that don´t have matte golden contacts sounded more analogue (as I have have written before in this thread on a page I can´t remember - so, sorry for repeating old stuff).

To sum up I still use a SONY 1-10 90MB/s SDHC I 32 GB. As an alternative I can recommend a Transcend 90MB7s 600x SDHC 10-1 32GB. Both are a good compromise between SQ and booting time.

Last but not least another point is also helpful to follow - a point Superdad once mentioned - : 

- how to remove Spotlight

- how to turn off Spaces

- how to turn off Safe Sleep - as Superdad pointed out: "file is at least half the size as your system RAM; so for my 16GB machine that's an 8GB file written!"

 

Kind regards,

Uwe

[abulr]

13 hours ago, alsterfan said:

- how to turn off Spaces

 

what does that mean?

[alsterfan]

1 hour ago, abulr said:

 

what does that mean?

Hi abulr,

hopefully when Superdad has started his day, he will read your question and answer it. Unfortunately I am not the IT expert to answer it myself.

This is how it can be done using the commands Superdad wrote about a long time ago:

 

"Remove Spotlight icon from menu bar:

 

sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search

 

killall SystemUIServer

 

Turn off Spaces:

Defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces -bool false

 

killall Dock

 

Turn off Safe Sleep (prevent background copying of RAM contents to boot drive file): Google about it and you will see that the sleep file is mostly an a vestige of the past, and was meant for laptops.

 

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

 

Actually, the above command is part of the CAD 1.2.2 script, but the below two are not.

Delete existing Safe Sleep file (file is at least half the size as your system RAM; so for my 16GB machine that's an 8GB file written!):

 

sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

 

Keep it from coming back after restart:

 

sudo ln -s /dev/null /var/vm/sleepimage

 

end of quotation.

 

A small addendum on my behalf:

Superdad wrote this in those days when OS Mavericks was top-notch. In the meantime (from El Capitan onwards) Apple has implemented a security feature (SIP) preventing you from changing the OS by the above commands. In order to circumvent this here is a workaround:

1. Reboot from your SD card pressing CMD+R until the Apple logo can be seen.

2. open Terminal

3. enter in Terminal: csrutil disable

After reboot enter the above (Superdad´s)  commands. 

4. After reboot enter in Terminal csrutil enable. That´s it.

 

I hope I could help you.

Kind regards,

Uwe

 

P.S. To control the success look at the size of MacOS on your SD card before and after having entered the commands. As Superdad mentioned its size should be considerably smaller now.

 

 

[abulr]

1 hour ago, alsterfan said:

Defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces -bool false

 

 

ah... workspaces... got it! thx