New Year: My Best Advice In Regards To Audio is...

[mansr]

Don't spend money on snake oil.

[mansr]

Excellent Advice Indeed! Of course, one man's snake oil is another man's balm...

 

I think we all agree that snake oil is being sold even if we differ on the specifics.

[mansr]

I was led to believe years ago that most A/V receivers are not capable of sounding ''musical''. Exploring that option could be an interesting proposition but it's definitely one I hadn't envisioned in the near future.

 

An AVR is just a specialised computer together with a DAC in a fancy case. If you believe a regular computer can be part of a quality audio system, there's no reason to categorically discount AVRs, especially if used with a separate power amp. Most of them probably share many parts with more audio-centric devices in the same price class anyway. The Marantz ones even have a mode where they shut down all video parts in order to reduce interference when used for audio. I can't say I hear much of a difference, but clearly they're intended to be used for music as well as films.

[mansr]

As I tell my 16 year old son - treat others as you want to be treated - i.e. don't "USE" people for advice and then rip them off by buying on line. In doing so you will soon have no dealers left and no where to "listen" to equipment prior to buying, which the majority at CA believe is imperative before buying.

 

My most recently purchased item of some expense (a pair of B&W CM6 S2 speakers) wasn't even possible to buy new other than through a retailer (luckily I have one almost next-door), and it being a new product buying used wasn't much of an option either.

[mansr]

Get all flash memory based storage devices out of your audio system.

 

There goes my BIOS...

[mansr]

Removing flash devices delivered the largest step change in SQ I have ever experienced from a tweak, with a stunning improvement in richness and clarity.

 

And then there are those who swear SSDs make everything sound much better in all the usual ways.

[mansr]

I suppose this is possible if the situations are slightly different. Where active SATA I/O is going on, and the electronics of the SSD are relatively quieter than the mechanicals and electronics of the HDD it replaces, it seems logical the SSD will be quieter. OTOH, in lmitche's situation, where SATA I/O has been pretty well eliminated, what if the SSD has high idle power consumption and relatively noisy electronics?

 

SSDs have pretty low idle power consumption. As for noise, a gigabit Ethernet interface is probably no less noisy than a SATA interface + SSD. Sometimes you can hear them without even using any audio gear. No matter what you do, computers produce a lot of electrical noise which is why DACs need good noise isolation/rejection, and when they do, reducing the computer noise by a few per cent isn't going to make much difference on the analogue output.

[mansr]

"IPL", are you a mainframe guy?

 

My server is a QNAP NAS device, that has been de-QNAPped, and is running Archlinux with a realtime kernel hosting Samba, ISCSI target, and DNSMASQ. Boot, system and Music virtual drives are stored on a single WD 4TB HDD, as are the two virtual drives (LUNs) used to boot the audiopc with Audiolinux(Archlinux) or Windows 10.

 

Well with ISCSI done already, you have the tough part of becoming "flash-less" finished already. You should give it a go. PM me if I can help in anyway.

 

Root on NFS is considerably easier to configure, and for light load like an audio playback system performance is more than adequate.

[mansr]

Can you boot Win10 with root NFS?

 

No, but Arch (or any other) Linux can, and you mentioned that as well.