Cool magazine writeup of killer audio stack with laptop running Tidal at Munich 2023!!

[audiobomber]

The question is, would it perform better with audiophile enhancements? IMO, yes, no doubt.

[audiobomber]

22 hours ago, Kal Rubinson said:

Clearly, not everyone agrees. 

Do you not believe a Taiko Extreme or Antipodes Oladra would improve the sound? To keep it real,, even a Sonore opticalModule and opticalRendu would give a significant bump, IMO.

[audiobomber]

On 6/5/2023 at 9:39 PM, cjf said:

Personally, even if I won the lottery, I wouldn't buy a Taiko/Antipodes anything. I've not heard either of them and don't need to hear them to come to this conclusion. 

In other words, you don't really know.

On 6/5/2023 at 9:39 PM, cjf said:

 

If a potential buyer has no Computer skills what so ever or is so busy as to not be bothered with it all along with very deep pockets then I wont hold it against them for just buying one and being done with it. But, if someone has even the most basic Computer skills then there is no need to drop the price of a nice Car on a music server to get great SQ.

I agree, there's no need to drop a fortune on a server, unless you are shooting for SOTA sound. I'm not in that market, I just aim for sound that makes me happy. I have four streaming systems. Here's my music renderer ranking, based on personal testing in my systems:

1. exaSound PlayPoint

2. sMS-200 Neo

3. Chromecast Audio 

4. Raspberry Pi 3B+

5. Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop

 

 

On 6/5/2023 at 9:39 PM, cjf said:

 

A no holds barred home brew music server or very nice OTS Laptop will get you close enough. Spend a few hours killing extra processes and tuning the OS settings and you should have all you need to drive any system of any price....IMO

What settings do you suggest? I use my laptop in a very nice desktop system and any advice on how to improve it would be welcome. Note though that I also need to use it as a general purpose computer, so the settings would have to allow that . A laptop dedicated to simply playing music makes no sense to me, I would buy an actual single purpose audiophile streamer for the same price, not a laptop.