Mac Mini As A Streaming Source

So much bad info here. I’ve been using a Mac mini since 2005 as a music server. From 2012, as a headless music server. 
Most people buy music servers (macs, pcs, Aurender, innuos,Auralic or any other computer based server, yes, all of these servers are pcs underneath running a proprietary OS) and then run them on the same rack with your audio gear then using usb to hook them up to a dac. This is the worst possible setup you can do for sq (ok maybe toslink is worse just because toslink snot rate is sub par).

Yes, up until 2016/2017, I used my Mac in my audio room plugged into my dac using usb. I decided to get a dedicated music server so I auditioned the best models at the time and the best sounding with the best software was the Auralic Aries. I used the Aries to stream my ripped music to my external dac using usb. It was a little better than the Mac setup but convoluted because I had to run minimserver and upnp on the Mac to have Auralic connect to the macs hard disks where the music resided.

After a couple of years with this setup along with trying out all the gimmicks/tweaks to get usb to sound better, I sold all of this and went back and I a headless Mac mini running audirvana (then eventually Roon) connected by Ethernet to the dac (bought the best dac at the time with Ethernet and i2s inputs) and the sound quality was much better. The Mac resides in another room outside of my dedicated audio room so I don’t have to worry about computer noise or the need for any of the usb gimmicks.

Today, m1 Mac mini running Roon to 6 endpoints (1 of them being my dac in my audio room) all controlled by my iPad or iPhone. Even my volume level is controlled by my iPad using roon. The m1 Mac is 1 of the fastest computers on the market only beaten by the newer m2 and the upcoming m3 macs.

I ran Roon on a $50k enterprise Linux server using 256g and f ram and all enterprise class solid state storage (pcie, nvme, and SSD’s) running Linux and the sound quality was no different than the Mac mini.

IMO, the sound quality of a music server boils down to the software you run to retrieve the music, not the hardware and especially not the hardware when using Ethernet to the dac and having the server isolated in another room. I’ve used apples iTunes 18 years ago, then amarra, pure music, audirvana, Auralic lightning DS and Lumins software running the Auralic Aries, and now Roon. I have played with some of the latest versions of audirvana which might be possibly better sounding than Roon but the graphical UI is pretty bad. 
 

As for sound quality, I sold my $14k vinyl equipment, phono preamp, cleaning crap, and all my hundreds of vinyl albums 4 years ago and haven’t missed it for a second. Hires/MQA/DSD sounds better and more enjoyable to use than vinyl.

Mercy of Apple updates? Come on, you can do better than this. You don’t need to apple any OS update if you don’t want to. How about updates to the proprietary OS running in the Auralic/Aurender streamers? You trust these updates that might have had a few people test them out compared to the thousands of testers of any Apple update?

If you are running Roon on a Mac and concerned about running Time Machine or any other process while playing Roon/audirvana, then turn those processes off. For over a dozen years if not longer, I have turned Time Machine off and I run a schedule for time finder to run when I’m not playing music. Not a big deal. Same for other processes.

Maybe a lot of these posters are new to computers/streamers, but every 1 of these devices perform millions of instructions per second/minute or many more. If you think running a process adds noise, then every streamer would be sounding like a jet engine.

If vendors claim they limit processes because of generating noise, ask for specifics on how much noise will be eliminated by not running a certain process especially if the computer resides in another room.

If you think that your computer is taxed resource wise by running extra processes, have you ever looked at the computer stats while running Roon/audirvana? Try it, using a newer Mac especially with apple M series processors, roon/audirvana take up very little computer resources. 

As for dacs with usb, some of the best dacs don’t even include usb anymore. I2s and Ethernet perform better. Why do you think there are tens maybe hundreds of usb tweaks/gimmicks to try to get usb to sound better? How many tweaks do you find for bettering i2s and Ethernet besides getting the best cable you can afford?