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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!


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Hi BobL,

Just a small correction. Must have been somebody else you were thinking of. I am still using an iMac, waiting for nearly 1 year

(http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f22-networking-networked-audio-and-streaming/fanless-12%B4%B4-macbook-air-coming-soon-19993/)

for Apple to release a fanless Mac Book Air. As rumors go this might well happen in a few weeks:

Retina MacBook Air: Everything We Know | MacRumors

and that is what I want to try next.

Regards,

Uwe

 

 

I have some tidying up to do.

 

Apologies, Uwe, and your experience with the fanless MacBook will be very interesting. I had Alsterfan confused with alfe. Well, I got three letters right! Pictures of his external fan are at

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/mac-mini-version-computer-audiophile-pocket-server-music-server-step-step-17666/index4.html#post285755

 

Tranz’ pictures of his passive cooling rig are at

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/mac-mini-version-computer-audiophile-pocket-server-music-server-step-step-17666/index5.html

 

Finally, apologies to Jolida. I thought I had posted the fan connection picture earlier, but I was wrong, so here it is

 

MacMiniUnibodyfan.jpg

The outer two connections are all you need for a dc supply, around 3.5v.

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have you tried to reboot thereafter ? I've lost hours before I came to the conclusion that how little sense it makes, deleting mighty unrelated .kext prevents launch caches creations thus forcing me to redo my sd card....

 

 

of course the alternative view is that when I regained the capacity to launch from my sd card just after I put back in place the last .kext it was just by chance while my sd card would have erratic problems...

 

That's very unfortunate. I am surprised as to how that could happen. I have deleted those 5 kexts pertaining to the firewire, as I do not use that port, nor do I intend to use it anytime soon. But I am puzzled as to how that can affect your Os from booting.

 

Apart from the above 5, I have recently deleted 10 others relating to the Bluetooth & Thunderbolt ports. I have re-booted many times since then with absolutely no issues. I'm sorry for what happened with ur machine.

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I have some tidying up to do.

 

Apologies, Uwe, and your experience with the fanless MacBook will be very interesting. I had Alsterfan confused with alfe. Well, I got three letters right! Pictures of his external fan are at

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/mac-mini-version-computer-audiophile-pocket-server-music-server-step-step-17666/index4.html#post285755

 

Tranz’ pictures of his passive cooling rig are at

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/mac-mini-version-computer-audiophile-pocket-server-music-server-step-step-17666/index5.html

 

Finally, apologies to Jolida. I thought I had posted the fan connection picture earlier, but I was wrong, so here it is

 

MacMiniUnibodyfan.jpg

The outer two connections are all you need for a dc supply, around 3.5v.

 

Thank u so much. That was indeed very helpful.

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Apart from the above 5, I have recently deleted 10 others relating to the Bluetooth & Thunderbolt ports. I have re-booted many times since then with absolutely no issues. I'm sorry for what happened with ur machine.

 

Hi Jolida,

please do tell us which new kext files you could eliminate without doing harm to your OSX.

With respect to the way my chain is working (I neither need the inbuilt camera, nor Thunderbolt-, RAID HDDs), I could also delete:

Apple iSight

AppleCameraInterface

AppleRAID

AppleRAIDCard

One should not eliminate AppleMobileDevice. Having done that scrolling was no longer possible.

But since I use an SD card, after booting from the internal Yosemite OSX, I could easily put this kext file back again, not encountering any glitches afterwards.

Regards,

Uwe

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Hi Jolida,

please do tell us which new kext files you could eliminate without doing harm to your OSX.

With respect to the way my chain is working (I neither need the inbuilt camera, nor Thunderbolt-, RAID HDDs), I could also delete:

Apple iSight

AppleCameraInterface

AppleRAID

AppleRAIDCard

One should not eliminate AppleMobileDevice. Having done that scrolling was no longer possible.

But since I use an SD card, after booting from the internal Yosemite OSX, I could easily put this kext file back again, not encountering any glitches afterwards.

Regards,

Uwe

 

Hi.

I am at work now, so I don't have the list of kexts I have deleted recently. I will post when I'm back home in the next 2 hours.

From what I have read, the osx loads a long list of drivers in the kernel at boot up. Most of these are not used (atleast by many of us while using the machine as audio-only) for our purpose.

The best way to see which files have been loaded in the system, is to open the Terminal & run the 'kextstat' command.

This will show u a long list of kexts that are loaded in the kernel. As u go through the list, u will see many files which are of no use to u.

A few of them belonging to the Thunderbolt port, Infrared, Bluetooth, Graphics etc are something which can easily be removed if the same are not used. And they do absolutely NO harm to the working of the OS. You can just trash the files & keep them in the trash or on a folder on another partition so that if u intend to use them at any time, u can always restore them.

 

Another way of killing active processes easily (apart from the activity monitor) is to open the Terminal & run the 'top' command. Again u will see a list of active processes with their PID. Then by using the

Kill -9 xxx

command (replace the xxx with the PID of the process) u can safely kill the process.

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GOOD question and it's fair to add that I deleted Apple iSight

AppleCameraInterface + thunderbolt related kext ( I can't see why it caused problems though...)

Hi Jolida,

please do tell us which new kext files you could eliminate without doing harm to your OSX.

With respect to the way my chain is working (I neither need the inbuilt camera, nor Thunderbolt-, RAID HDDs), I could also delete:

Apple iSight

AppleCameraInterface

AppleRAID

AppleRAIDCard

One should not eliminate AppleMobileDevice. Having done that scrolling was no longer possible.

But since I use an SD card, after booting from the internal Yosemite OSX, I could easily put this kext file back again, not encountering any glitches afterwards.

Regards,

Uwe

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The best way to see which files have been loaded in the system, is to open the Terminal & run the 'kextstat' command.

 

Hi Jolida,

Thanks for your information. You seem to know a lot more about how OSX works under the hood than I do. This means that having a look at the drivers being loaded I really can´t figure out what they do in the background, as most of them have names that don´t give me a clue about their purposes.

So I better wait until you tell us more of what you could remove.

 

Regards,

Uwe

 

P.S. Up to now I never opened the Extensions folder. Now I get an idea of what I can achieve SQ-wise if taking a close look at these drivers too. Thank you!

 

 

Hi Le Concombre Masqué,

It´s a pity what happened to you. Once again it shows, how difficult conversation can be about things that we are interested in here. Be it a remark about SQ or alterations of OSX, we have to bear in mind that the hardware and software we use are so much different that deterioration can always happen where other people hear a big improvement in SQ or the responsiveness of your music OS.

 

Regards,

Uwe

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Gentlemen:

Please move the OS tweaking discussion over to the other thread. You both know which one I am referring to. There are people who subscribe to that thread who will be interested. And filling up this one with detailed tweaks is not desirable. Thanks much.

--Alex C.

 

P.S. Alle good stuff though--I'm taking notes for when I dive back into my own boot card. Please,do post your current low idling process counts. Are either of you under 50 yet?

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Please,do post your current low idling process counts. Are either of you under 50 yet?

 

Hi Alex,

Me too I would like to know about this, but having killed many processes the activity monitor keeps blank (and I don´t know which service was responsible for this behavior).

 

Best wishes,

Uwe

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Hi Jolida,

Thanks for your information. You seem to know a lot more about how OSX works under the hood than I do. This means that having a look at the drivers being loaded I really can´t figure out what they do in the background, as most of them have names that don´t give me a clue about their purposes.

So I better wait until you tell us more of what you could remove.

 

Regards,

Uwe

 

P.S. Up to now I never opened the Extensions folder. Now I get an idea of what I can achieve SQ-wise if taking a close look at these drivers too. Thank you!

 

 

Hi Le Concombre Masqué,

It´s a pity what happened to you. Once again it shows, how difficult conversation can be about things that we are interested in here. Be it a remark about SQ or alterations of OSX, we have to bear in mind that the hardware and software we use are so much different that deterioration can always happen where other people hear a big improvement in SQ or the responsiveness of your music OS.

 

Regards,

Uwe

 

 

Hi.

This is the screenshot of my Trash folder. U can see the 24 files I have deleted with No problems whatsoever to the working of the OS.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jgxcaahqq2o9rzh/Screen%20Shot%202015-02-26%20at%209.04.41%20pm.png?dl=0

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Gentlemen:

Please move the OS tweaking discussion over to the other thread. You both know which one I am referring to. There are people who subscribe to that thread who will be interested. And filling up this one with detailed tweaks is not desirable. Thanks much.

--Alex C.

 

P.S. Alle good stuff though--I'm taking notes for when I dive back into my own boot card. Please,do post your current low idling process counts. Are either of you under 50 yet?

 

Discussion moved to

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f11-software/slim-down-23581/

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Not following the progress of the mac mini platform but is it correct that purchasing an entry level mini for $479 leaves you with no options to expand RAM?

 

That's correct. Not only that, but the $499 mini is just an entry-level 1.4GHz Core i5 "Haswell" with 4GB RAM--not the best choice for music server if any DSP like SRC/SDM is going to be performed.

The 2.6GHz i5 unit with 8GB RAM at $699 is really the proper starting point for a music server. And a lot of us run an i7 version with 16GB RAM.

Yes, Macs are never cheap, but let's not get into a debate about the value of such. We all know Apple did not become the richest company in the world by selling things cheaply. One of these years I'll take a stab at a building a Hackintosh. But I might want to put it in an old Mac Cube case (I always loved that orphan. :))

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thank you Uwe, I will be crazy enough to give another try but this time I won't mess with the kext that, per kexstat, my os did not even seem to care previously, such as the FW ones...

Hi Jolida,

Thanks for your information. You seem to know a lot more about how OSX works under the hood than I do. This means that having a look at the drivers being loaded I really can´t figure out what they do in the background, as most of them have names that don´t give me a clue about their purposes.

So I better wait until you tell us more of what you could remove.

 

Regards,

Uwe

 

P.S. Up to now I never opened the Extensions folder. Now I get an idea of what I can achieve SQ-wise if taking a close look at these drivers too. Thank you!

 

 

Hi Le Concombre Masqué,

It´s a pity what happened to you. Once again it shows, how difficult conversation can be about things that we are interested in here. Be it a remark about SQ or alterations of OSX, we have to bear in mind that the hardware and software we use are so much different that deterioration can always happen where other people hear a big improvement in SQ or the responsiveness of your music OS.

 

Regards,

Uwe

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I have some tidying up to do.

 

Apologies, Uwe, and your experience with the fanless MacBook will be very interesting. I had Alsterfan confused with alfe. Well, I got three letters right! Pictures of his external fan are at

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/mac-mini-version-computer-audiophile-pocket-server-music-server-step-step-17666/index4.html#post285755

 

Tranz’ pictures of his passive cooling rig are at

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/mac-mini-version-computer-audiophile-pocket-server-music-server-step-step-17666/index5.html

 

Finally, apologies to Jolida. I thought I had posted the fan connection picture earlier, but I was wrong, so here it is

 

MacMiniUnibodyfan.jpg

The outer two connections are all you need for a dc supply, around 3.5v.

 

Just a small clarification. U mentioned that it needs a mere 3.5vdc to power the fan. But on the pic u have attached, it shows that the fan runs at 12vdc rated around 0.5A.

Or have I mixed up something?

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Just a small clarification. U mentioned that it needs a mere 3.5vdc to power the fan. But on the pic u have attached, it shows that the fan runs at 12vdc rated around 0.5A.

Or have I mixed up something?

 

Jolida: Check your PMs. That's just it, the fan needs variable DC to change speed (based on its tachometer and the computer's thermal sensors, OS X runs it up and down). Trouble is--and this is what makes the fan nasty for SQ--it is a PWM (pulse width modulated) circuit running at about 25kHz, and not a smooth linear supply. The Mac always sends 12V to the fan--but as a stream of pulses of about 0.5A! Eliminating that makes a very big difference.

A bit surprised that BobL did not mention our MMK linear fan controller, since he uses one, and the linear fan control idea was inspired last year by his externally powering the fan (I sent him a final kit for free as a thank-you).

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Jolida: Check your PMs. That's just it, the fan needs variable DC to change speed (based on its tachometer and the computer's thermal sensors, OS X runs it up and down). Trouble is--and this is what makes the fan nasty for SQ--it is a PWM (pulse width modulated) circuit running at about 25kHz, and not a smooth linear supply. The Mac always sends 12V to the fan--but as a stream of pulses of about 0.5A! Eliminating that makes a very big difference.

A bit surprised that BobL did not mention our MMK linear fan controller, since he uses one, and the linear fan control idea was inspired last year by his externally powering the fan (I sent him a final kit for free as a thank-you).

 

Thanks for writing part of my answer for me, Alex. Just to clear things up, this started as a suggestion about how to simulate passive cooling, which you may remember I did (accidentally!) in my original dc expt. It's trivial to switch that external dc off and listen for the difference, but I'm not sure how you'd do that with the MMK...

However, the first post did include:

"In my experience ( and that of many others) the really major improvement came from a good LPS. Thereafter the main ones were external or MMK fan supply, and the Ramdisk operation, probably about equal."

 

Jolida, I don't know what the mini would sound like if you gave the fan 12vdc, but certainly it would be very noisy. I started with 4.5 v and I could hear the fan from my listening position, so I reduced it to 3.5v, and that was OK, but judging from later experiments I was probably running about 2,200rpm rather than the Apple 1800rpm. Individual fans may need slightly different voltages- they were never designed to run this way, and I think that when tranz ran in a similar way (on the route to passive cooling) he used about 5v.

 

Of course the downside of my version of the dc method is that there is no control of the fan if the CPU demand goes up unexpectedly. If you do find that dc operation of the fan does what you want, then Alex's MMK is a real long-term solution, which I am very glad to have in my system.

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Thanks Bob!

 

FYI, I installed an MMK board in a JS-2 buyer's 2011 Mac mini (server version) this week, and when I tested it out with the free "Macs Fan Control" utility (from Macs Fan Control - control fans of any Mac & Boot Camp! | CRYSTALIDEA Software) I found that unlike some other years/models, the lowest speed this one would go was 2300rpm. Still very quiet. And it was the exact same fan model as in your photo.

 

Regards,

 

--Alex C.

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very same Mac Mini (JS-2 and MMK board) and can confirm i never saw fan speed below 2300rpm (nor above, actually)

 

hi Alex ;)

Qnap HS-264 NAS (powered by an HD-Plex 100w LPS) > Cirrus7 Nimbini v2.5 Media Edition i7-8559U/32/512 running Roon ROCK (powered by a Keces P8 LPS) > Lumin U2  > Metrum Acoustics Adagio NOS digital preamplifier > First Watt SIT 3  power amplifier (or Don Garber Fi "Y" 6922 tube preamplifier + Don Garber Fi "X" 2A3 SET power amplifier, both powered from an Alpha-Core BP-30 Isolated Symmetrical Power Transformer) > Klipsch Cornwall III

 

headphones system:

Cirrus 7 > Lumin U2 > Metrum Acoustics Adagio > Pathos Aurium amplifier (powered by an UpTone Audio JS-2 LPS) > Focal Clear headphones

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Thanks Bob!

 

FYI, I installed an MMK board in a JS-2 buyer's 2011 Mac mini (server version) this week, and when I tested it out with the free "Macs Fan Control" utility (from Macs Fan Control - control fans of any Mac & Boot Camp! | CRYSTALIDEA Software) I found that unlike some other years/models, the lowest speed this one would go was 2300rpm. Still very quiet. And it was the exact same fan model as in your photo.

 

Regards,

 

--Alex C.

 

Hi Alex!

 

Interesting. Do you know what speed it ran at when it was under pulse control?

 

One thought, perhaps for JS to answer: given that fans respond differently to the same dc voltage, might this mean that the MMK needs to have a lower minimum voltage output to cope with superspeed fans like this one?

Cheers

 

Bob

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Hi Alex!

 

Interesting. Do you know what speed it ran at when it was under pulse control?

 

One thought, perhaps for JS to answer: given that fans respond differently to the same dc voltage, might this mean that the MMK needs to have a lower minimum voltage output to cope with superspeed fans like this one?

Cheers

 

Bob

 

I don't think that is correct Bob. The fans respond the same either way.

The minimum fan speed is dictated by the computer/OS. My 2012 can go down to 1800rpm with or without the MMK installed. And the 2011 I had could only go down to 2300 regardless. I don't know if it is the year or the fact that the 2011 I worked on had 2 hard drives installed.

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I don't know if it is the year or the fact that the 2011 I worked on had 2 hard drives installed.

 

think it's the year/model, Alex, as mine only had 1 SSD installed

(two now and nothing changed)

Qnap HS-264 NAS (powered by an HD-Plex 100w LPS) > Cirrus7 Nimbini v2.5 Media Edition i7-8559U/32/512 running Roon ROCK (powered by a Keces P8 LPS) > Lumin U2  > Metrum Acoustics Adagio NOS digital preamplifier > First Watt SIT 3  power amplifier (or Don Garber Fi "Y" 6922 tube preamplifier + Don Garber Fi "X" 2A3 SET power amplifier, both powered from an Alpha-Core BP-30 Isolated Symmetrical Power Transformer) > Klipsch Cornwall III

 

headphones system:

Cirrus 7 > Lumin U2 > Metrum Acoustics Adagio > Pathos Aurium amplifier (powered by an UpTone Audio JS-2 LPS) > Focal Clear headphones

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Thanks. Very helpful information.

I was thinking if there is a way to underclock (more like undervolt) the cpu such that it produces far less heat so that we can eliminate the fan altogether. We kinda did the same with the windows machine by reducing the number of cores used to a single, & under-volting it & bypassed the processor fan. Even without any passive cooling, it worked just fine forever. The trade-off being just a little performance loss in terms of speed, which is almost negligible if using the machine for nothing but audio.

 

MacRumors Forums - View Single Post - Yes! I underclocked my MacBook Pro

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