MAC Mini or Dedicated Streamer?

[botrytis]

Dedicated streamers do not have the processing power that the Mac-Mini has. Although the OS on the Mac-Mini does way more than streaming, it also provides more security which is something I do not trust embedded systems with.

 

Mac-Mini

[botrytis]

Need to look at the streamers for security of your internal house network. Many don't have any security, kind of like IoT appliances. That means a nefarious person or persons can infect them for their own purposes. That is what I worry about with streamers.

[botrytis]

I have with either JRiver on Win10 or Daphile to my TEAC UD-501 which is connected to my Audio Research SP-16 then to my Pioneer M-22 to my Revel m126Be speakers.

[botrytis]

9 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

Pioneer M-22 and a Wazoo?  You must have an interesting cellar.

 

I have a few sets of Royd Audio speakers there too, 6 sets to be exact and the AV77 center channel which weighs 55 lbs because it is a steel lined wooden box. I also have a nice set of Rogers LS2's 😁

 

I forgot I have a pair of Kenwood L-07M's too....

[botrytis]

Another possibility to use is a mini-PC with a Ryzen CPU. I recently acquired one with a Ryzen 9 4900H processor with 16 GB ram and a 512 GB SSD. I have JRiver 28 running on it currently and has more than enough power to do anything I want/need.

 

The new M1's are decent but with the SSD and memory directly soldered to the board, not expandable at all, and is cheaper to manufacture.

[botrytis]

22 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

And, in my experience, a dedicated linux OS will always sound better than an all purpose desktop OS.

 

I took advantage of the holiday sales and bought a new 1TB Samsung SSD and some thermal paste. I spent a few hours tearing my mini apart, reapplying new thermal paste and installing the new Samsung SSD. It sounds amazing running HQP Embedded on Ubuntu server.

 

edit: And as you can see, temps are great and it barely uses any resources. Specs are a dual core i5 and 16GB of RAM. Upsampling to 24/192 because that's the limit of the Schiit Yggy and Modi Multibit.

 

Not always. I have tried several dedicated Linux systems, and NONE sounded any better on this mini-PC. The Linux systems were installed on one 512 GB SSD I have, one after the other, when I did setup, listened and was disappointed. I am currently using Win 11 on the mini which needs no special drivers for my DAC, a TEAC UD-501. It was plug and play.

 

One issue with the Mac OS is there is always a layer of OS software between the hardware and software. My wife is finding that out now, in her new job where they use Apple computers. She is also finding out there is no rhyme or reason to what Unix command line editors, etc will work. She started in in DAC VAX, Unix, and a few others.

[botrytis]

There are also some nice WIn 11 mini-PC's currently out there - can use Linux also.

 

https://store.minisforum.com/collections/pre-sale/products/um560