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!

[Superdad]

I agree : LMS is not my cup of tea.

but here, with minimalist OS and LMS on RAM, The SQ is perfect.

background noise disepear.

 

Okay. Because this comes from you my earnest friend, I will try it! Have just downloaded the kernel he made for Mac mini, and when I have time I will try to figure out how to use it.

 

Thanks,

ALEX

[jamesg11]

Thanks Alex! Will wait, patiently, for your observations ...

[BobL]

Okay. Because this comes from you my earnest friend, I will try it! Have just downloaded the kernel he made for Mac mini, and when I have time I will try to figure out how to use it.

 

Thanks,

ALEX

 

 

Alex. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been looking at this with a lot of interest, but a bit nervously. Thanks for taking it on- good luck, and keep us posted, especially if you agree with Pascal!

[Pascal64]

The most difficult is : make that USB stick !

can't find how to do without Windows.

[Superdad]

The most difficult is : make that USB stick !

can't find how to do without Windows.

 

By far the best utility out there (goodbye forever unetbootin!) is Mac Linux USB Loader. It is a dream and takes the frustration out of the task. Please see both:

 

https://github.com/SevenBits/Mac-Linux-USB-Loader/wiki

read that Wiki!

 

and

 

https://sevenbits.github.io/Mac-Linux-USB-Loader/

 

Mac Linux USB Loader replaced a whole folder of bookmarks I had for pages detailing various (often conflicting) processes for making bootable Linux thumb drives.

 

Now maybe I can find a way to get Linux to boot from an SD card!

[Superdad]

Thanks Alex! Will wait, patiently, for your observations ...

 

 

Hi James and Bob:

Guess you missed the part where I stated "when I have time."

 

Even I'm shocked at the list of hi-fi tasks and experiments the biz keeps me from getting to. I've had a beautiful piano gloss black pair of Rythmik Audio F12G subwoofers sitting here since the beginning of January. To hook them up I either need to make the RCA-jack/cable splitter board I sketched or see if my Hovland HP200i-P preamp's XLR output will/won't form a ground loop with the single-ended output for my RADIA amp (shouldn't, but then I need to make a 24-foot XLR cable set and figure out how to run it past the studio door; the current set runs in channels under the carpet from when I built the room).

 

So I hope someone else tries the LMS in RAM trick first--rather than waiting on me.

[Pascal64]

Hello guys,

 

while some people here (follow my finger) are busy to test the micro rendu, did you have time to give a ear to Tinysqueeze ?

 

LMS is the same punishment lol

Tinysqueeze make a lot of buz on the other side of atlantic....

it will be intrested to compare but i dont have the micro rendu

[jamesg11]

"Guess you missed the part where I stated "when I have time." "

 

Nope, that was the import of "..."!

[Pascal64]

Try it jamesg11

y've just update the french thread (and screen shoot)

"not so difficult" says a friend of me yesterday

[Pascal64]

Hello Guys

 

Tinysqueeze is over.... Now Time to Snake oil (no joke, it's â serious one)

But for me, back to Audirvana. Those linux things are to much with details.

i prefer the warm side. Notes of music must be full, to much précision kills musicality.

 

by the way, i decide to move my SSD out of the Mac mini.

he is now in a Qnap 251, direct linked with the a cat5.

 

Alex, with this kind of junction (Mac to Mac or Mac to NAS) did you still use the blue-jean cat 6a ?

 

i've tried many cat5, cross or not, cat 7(awfull) and cat 6.

everytime i have the same feeling : the sound is to slow, to grainy, to much organic or analytic.

 

did you try optical link ?

 

best regards,

Pascal

[Pascal64]

I answer to me lol

just try an optical bridge between Qnap and Mac mini and prefer without.

music has more weight with my Cat5e.

(Sorry for my poor english)

i've just order a blue-jeans Cat6

 

best regards

Pascal

[Tand]

How do you guys clone your SD card? I installed CCC (trial version) and copied my card to a USB stick because my HD is almost full. I put a new SD card in the SD card reader on my rMBP and transeferes all files. The card is pre formated as the original SD card (Extended/Journaled w/GUID partition table). All fine so far, I think.

 

The problem is that I have a back up on my Time Capsul I want to use (a later version than I have on my original SD card). When the indicator shows full and indicates all is (almost) complete, it freezes.

 

I have tried to reset PRAM, back up from clean (pre formated) SD card and from fresh install of E. C. and finally with new cloned SD card.

 

Do I clone my original SD card wrong? Should I use a SD card reader (to usb) and make a SD card to SD card copy?

 

Best

Tommy

[Pascal64]

Sorry for my poor english.

to clone my SD card, i simply make à copy with the finder on another Mac.

then use corbon copy cloner to put it on the New SD card.

answer "yes" to make a recovery things

very easy

 

by the way, the lexard 2000 sounds very good !

much better than transcend to my ears.

[Tand]

Thanks Pascal64. It seems I did not answer Yes on recovery. It works, hopefully the backup dont freeze. Going to try now.

 

Which Transcend do you compare with the Lexar 2000 (is it the 300 mb card)? I use the Sandisc Extreme Pro 95 mb and are very happy, but I have not compared other fast SD cards. I used a Transcend 45 mb card and it made my mini noticable slower than the Sandisc Exreme Pro 95 mb.

[Pascal64]

I had à Transcend 95mb/s and move to a lexar same speed.

sounds à little better so i try the lexar 2000 (300mb/s) and it sounds even better.

some micro details apear.

not à lot, of course but it is a small nice improvment.

[tapatrick]

Thanks Alex for this great tip. Ive been trying this occasionally over the past few years or so but even though I've invested in a top music server I keep coming back to playing music through Vox with files loaded in Ramdisk. Freaking great through usb out, optical is still a tad harsh. Can't seem to get either Vox or hqplayer (trial) to play from Ramdisk in El Capitain tho' just the files. But in any case it's magic with 8gb Ramdisk which can hold an evenings listening.

[AnotherSpin]

Can't seem to get either Vox or hqplayer (trial) to play from Ramdisk in El Capitain tho' just the files. But in any case it's magic with 8gb Ramdisk which can hold an evenings listening.

I tried SD card trick with lot of enthusiasm and certain level of satisfaction as result while toying with Amarra and A+. Nevertheless, with HQP as a main player in a system it seem to be needless.

[tapatrick]

I tried SD card trick with lot of enthusiasm and certain level of satisfaction as result while toying with Amarra and A+. Nevertheless, with HQP as a main player in a system it seem to be needless.

 

Interesting.. Thanks, The route to digital audio satisfaction is a long and winding road! The ram disk route is for sure not very pretty or integrated but gives results worth the effort. Are you saying the noise free result can be achieved with hqplayer? What are you running it on?

 

Ta Patrick

[tapatrick]

It's gone quiet here, I imagine because of all the interest and success of the new MRendu which seems to solve many noise/isolation issues in one tidy package.

I've not been able to try MR out and may not for some time due to the other hardware changes I would have to make first, having a music server source that's not network orientated.

However I've experimented with Roon & HQ player running on my mbook pro laptop (with and without SD card boot and ram disk serving the music files). It's always no contest - SD card/RAM disk is always outstanding. Running Roon & Hqplayer alone does not solve noise and digital glare and confirms why I moved away from mac source originally.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[BobL]

Thanks Alex for this great tip. Ive been trying this occasionally over the past few years or so but even though I've invested in a top music server I keep coming back to playing music through Vox with files loaded in Ramdisk. Freaking great through usb out, optical is still a tad harsh. Can't seem to get either Vox or hqplayer (trial) to play from Ramdisk in El Capitain tho' just the files. But in any case it's magic with 8gb Ramdisk which can hold an evenings listening.

 

 

My thanks for this also, Alex! Also for developing the Regen and MMK, which have also made an enormous difference to my system, particularly when the cascaded Regens are run from my LPS (Sorry, but still Paul Hynes!)

 

However, as you said many posts ago, Ramdisk is not very convenient. Nevertheless, I had got quite used to calling up Ramdisk Creator every time I started up, choosing music files from my external HDD via iTunes, loading these into a 5G Ramdisk, and then moving these to Audirvana’s PlayQueue.

 

Very clunky, and it’s a bit annoying to have to plan the listening in advance; it would be so much easier to have all my library available in ”real time”, so I had been thinking about gutting an old Time Capsule which has a noisy disk drive, and installing a new quieter one in it to make a cheapo NAS/BlueJeans cable source.

 

BUT… I may have found a better way. However, I still can’t really believe it works; if anyone else had told be I would not have believed it. I’m hoping someone can be convinced enough to try repeating what will probably sound crazy, and I’d be glad of results and any comments.

 

Two years ago, in the days of the old Audirvana 1.5, I had set up a collection of Playlists, but I assumed that these could not be used with Ramdisk. When I tried copying any of these to the Ramdisk, all I got was an m3u image occupying only a few K, when the Lists are anything from several 100M to a few G, so obviously the files were not getting transferred. However, a week or so ago I tried the stupid thing of moving this m3u image to the PlayQueue (in version 2.5.3), and to my amazement, there were all the items on the original Playlist. Even more amazingly, they play, and to my ears the sound is the same as when I put the original files into Ramdisk to play them!

 

I am baffled by this. Although I am apparently only using a few MB of the 5GB available, it plays as if the entire Playlist, several G, were there in Ramdisk. It seemed that I could now put my entire collection on to the Ramdisk as images of the Playlists, and choose one (or more!) for the PlayQueue. Of course I still need to set up the Ramdisk each time I start up the Mini, and move the images on to it, but that is relatively trivial now I am used to it; maybe I won't power down the Mini so much.

 

The Audirvana playlist files are quite old; the folder was created in Jan 2013, so presumably this was using the 1.5 version. As an experiment, I went back to 1.5.12 and recreated my present collection as Playlists, then reverted to 2.5.3. For this, I uninstalled the CAD file so that I could see what I was doing. One maybe important point is that I don’t hear much if any improvement from playing with the CAD installed. Maybe my 79-year old ears are not hearing as well as they used to, but thinking back, I’m not sure I checked this when I first installed the CAD; it was the thing to do, so I did it. If anybody else has views on this, that would be useful (if only to calibrate my hearing!)

 

These new playlists include a lot of files which I have been using as test files over the last few years, and Yes, I still hear no difference between playing these from the Playlist image on Ramdisk, and from the original files on Ramdisk. This is a more immediate check than anything I can do about the CAD comparison, which needs an accurate memory over several minutes.

 

I have no clue about what’s going on. For those who understand something of the inner workings of Audirvana, is it possible that the m3u image file calls up the original source and feeds it in via the Ramdisk?

 

One final comment- if this works for other people, you hardly need to increase your RAM size for Alex’s trick- 4G should be more than enough….

[AnotherSpin]

Sounds interesting! It is a pity I do not play with A+ anymore.

[Freann]

A m3u file is actually a text file containing paths to the original file. A+ is playing the file from your external HDD. Placing the m3u on ram disk makes absolute no difference in the way A+ operates.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U

[BobL]

A m3u file is actually a text file containing paths to the original file. A+ is playing the file from your external HDD. Placing the m3u on ram disk makes absolute no difference in the way A+ operates.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U

 

Thanks for this, Freann, and apologies to anybody who might have wasted time trying to replicate what I wrote above.

 

In fact, it is just a problem with my hearing loss. I have now tried the right experiment, comparing the sound of A+ calling the file directly from my HDD with the same file via Ramdisk. They sound the same to me now, though this was certainly not true a couple of years ago. A pity I didn't think of trying this earlier...

[Superdad]

Thanks for this, Freann, and apologies to anybody who might have wasted time trying to replicate what I wrote above.

 

In fact, it is just a problem with my hearing loss. I have now tried the right experiment, comparing the sound of A+ calling the file directly from my HDD with the same file via Ramdisk. They sound the same to me now, though this was certainly not true a couple of years ago. A pity I didn't think of trying this earlier...

 

No problem Bob. But I admit you had me scratching my head about it (that's why I said nothing).

 

Indeed, as Freann said, the m3u files contain paths/pointers to the location of the file at the time it was added to the playlist. I used to take advantage of that (and sure I described such way upthread) to do "blind" comparisons between music file/interface locations. One can drag the same-titled track to an A+ playlist from multiple locations (SD card, RAMdisk, network drive, local FW drive, internal SATA drive) and the listing for the track will look identical. Then compare playback of each (though you have to do some things to be fair about A+'s pre-caching activity). Write down your preferences based on the tracks' entry order in the list; Then, to figure out which was which, delete the actual file from each location (one at a time) and see which playlist pointer no longer works.

 

I even did the above for a friend who had a hard time believing file playback interface matters. He picked the RAMdisk as sounding the most different, really liked the SDcard and my network drive files, and locally-attached drives the least. Then I attached a USB drive for the file and said he "threw up in his mouth a little" after experiencing all the others.

[BobL]

No problem Bob. But I admit you had me scratching my head about it (that's why I said nothing).

 

Indeed, as Freann said, the m3u files contain paths/pointers to the location of the file at the time it was added to the playlist. I used to take advantage of that (and sure I described such way upthread) to do "blind" comparisons between music file/interface locations. One can drag the same-titled track to an A+ playlist from multiple locations (SD card, RAMdisk, network drive, local FW drive, internal SATA drive) and the listing for the track will look identical. Then compare playback of each (though you have to do some things to be fair about A+'s pre-caching activity). Write down your preferences based on the tracks' entry order in the list; Then, to figure out which was which, delete the actual file from each location (one at a time) and see which playlist pointer no longer works.

 

I even did the above for a friend who had a hard time believing file playback interface matters. He picked the RAMdisk as sounding the most different, really liked the SDcard and my network drive files, and locally-attached drives the least. Then I attached a USB drive for the file and said he "threw up in his mouth a little" after experiencing all the others.

 

 

Thanks Alex,

 

We oldies are very bad at admitting we are getting older, especially to ourselves, until we are forced to. I'll check, next time I feel strong enough, with the USB stick as drive- I'm just a bit nervous about what the result might be! At the moment I'm comforting myself with having tried a demo of a famous name one-box unit, to see if that might be possible as part of downsizing. Although it was playing back 96K versions of tracks I know at 44.1K, it still had the 'throw-up" effect.

 

Cheers

 

Bob