Help: Finding a Renderer utilising an External HDD for supply of music

[JoeyGS]

Has anyone acquired and used the new Auralic Aries Mini?

 

Looks like this is the one I am looking for......

[franz159]

Have you looked at distros tailored specifically for audio renderers? Eg Volumio does an excellent impression of an OpenHome Media renderer for the Raspberry Pi 2, though admittedly I haven't seen anyone mention using Volumio with a USB HDD attached.

 

I have been running this kind of configuration using Raspberry for a couple of years now.

On the software side, I started using Volumio, then RuneAudio and currently Moode Audio.

 

Since Raspberry B+ and then Pi2 were released, it is easily possible to use an attached USB HDD without additional USB hub or external power, once you set the "MAX_USB_CURRENT=1" parameter in raspberry /boot/config.txt file.

I am using either Samsung M3 2Tb HDD or Seagate Backup Plus 1 Tb or 2Tb external HDD (formatted exFat or FAT32).

It works well even when you use a USB dac connected at the same time on another USB port of the raspberry.

 

However, for best SQ, I'm now using HiFiBerry Digi+ card on the Raspberry, which allows me to connect to my LHLabs Geek Pulse X dac using coaxial cable.

 

On the sw side, my latest addition has been Bubble UPnP server in order to stream also Tidal from the same low cost(*1), low power(*2) , high quality streaming solution.

 

(*1)(*2) Since the addition of an external linear PSU, cost and power requirements have gone up a bit admittedly, but so has the SQ!

[BobSherman]

Please can we not start this argument here!

 

Eloise

(Just my 2 cents)

Where do you see an argument?