Whats the upgrade path from a Yggdrasil (Yiggy)

[One and a half]

On 07/04/2018 at 11:10 AM, krelldog said:

I have a Pass Labs INT-60- (9K)- Martin Logan Montis"s- (10K) PS Audio- P-10- (5K)...all Audience wires and cords????

 

What are my weaknesses???

Heh, for not telling us the whole story from the beginning. 

 

The Linn or Lumin route is a good idea. By the time there's progressive spending on DACs, power supplies, the price of a good all in one streamer is often surpassed. With the Linn, Lumin, you can keep the mac mini as is, use it as a file store, since the streamers only need a source of data, but some consideration needs to be given to how the streamers are connected to the network. My own observation is Ethernet is just as vulnerable to common mode noise like USB.

 

Would strongly suggest to replace Jriver with Roon, so that difficult network management is taken care of a hell of a lot easier. For Linn, a caveat, wait until their new firmware, Katalyst, and Roon certification starts shipping. Roon is currently in the Alpha stage, Katalyst was announced late March 2018. The players themselves have a heritage of about 10 years something.

[One and a half]

7 hours ago, oneway23 said:

Off-topic, and, I'll be happy to take this elsewhere, but, I'm very confused by this software.  What happened to good, old-fashioned, bit-perfect playback? 

 

I readily admit that I'm open to being educated, but, I thought folks were chasing purity of signal?  Does it have something to do with upsampling to avoid harsh sloping of digital filters?  I guess I'm confused as to why people seem to have gotten really into manipulating the digital bits these days, especially after years of forum debates where folks couldn't decide if .FLAC and .WAV sounded the same.

 

Excellent responses from @Dr Tone and @rayl1234, there's up-sampling and filtering in the PC which is close to infinitely adjustable depending on the DAC. This is the tricky part  The range of adjustments takes some time to learn, each filter and up-sampler reacts differently to the connected DAC. It also depends on the music content as well, acoustic jazz for example would have different filtering to a popular recording from 1986 for example. The flexibility is for HQPlayer software in that it can play 'straight' or with a number of filters. If you want to tinker, you can, or just leave it as is. HQPlayer is only good for filter processing, don't count on it too much, to manage the library; to that I will openly state it's hopeless, it's not designed that way. HQPlayer is best left as an engine, between a library manager such as Roon which integrates very well and the DAC.

 

The term 'bit perfect playback' is a bit of a myth. That's the theory in the computing world where data is data. Where this comes unstuck is how the transmission of that data enters a physical place as unwanted electrical parasites are added to this data. This is identified and can be measured, but to eliminate it, is very difficult for now, but some inroads in use such as Regen, IsoRegen, Micro USB3.0, Recovery do assist in shaping and controlling unwanted parasites.