i read the reviews in TAS on music servers and the $6k and $12k music servers reviewed don't offer any more than my mac setup (except the touch screen), and my mac setup does much more and it is thousands cheaper. IMO, i haven't heard a music server that sounds decent, they all need an external dac to improve the sound. Even in the TAS review, they indicated that these needed an external dac. a mac with itunes 7 using cover flow, hooked up directly to an external dac using the toslink cable, with a raid 5 disk setup with terabytes of data, multiple airport express units for whole house audio capabilities, an ipod touch or iphone to remotely control itunes from another part of the house, and you have a system that offers more than the reviewed servers and is still thousands less than the $6k model that was reviewed. if you want to spend a little more money, you can buy used mac mini's to substitute for the airport express and you can share the itunes library from 1 central source and have multi-source, multi zone music, plus you get web access from each location the mini is setup. |
it is easy to hook up a toslink cable from a mac or an airport express device to an external dac. it is also very easy to build a whole house distributed music system or a dedicated audio setup using a mac computer. you first have to determine what you want: single room setup or whole house distributed system, how much money do you want to spend, and what kind of sound quality do you want to have.
personally, i wouldn't use a macbook or any mac laptop as a music server. IMO, they are not built to be left on 24x7x365 days a year like a powermac or a newer mac pro. i have been looking on the internet for a used g5 powermac that can be used as my music server. i use a macbook to remotely control my mini from another room/floor to play itunes to other locations using either cat 5e cable or wireless.
if you use an apple tv device or a mac mini in each room where you want music, you can use front row with its remote to control itunes.
as for disk, a NAS device with RAID options is the way to go but costs more $$$$, |
want a nice interface, use your iphone or ipod touch and get an itunes interface to control your music remotely. Sonos is a nice setup if you don't want to get your hands a little dirty in building a more complete setup. i use airport express unit for my remote systems and it is quite a bit cheaper than going an alternate route like the sonos. take the extra $$$ and buy an external dac for each airport express and get much better sound than any out of the box music server (of coarse it depends on the quality of the dac). |
i mentioned in another thread that macbooks or laptops would not be good for a music server. the reason is they get hot and heat will promote an early death for the computer. after using your macbook for a while, feel the bottom. mine gets very hot and so do my friends. now take a mac mini or macpro and do the same thing. very cool, i have my mini on top of a 500gb drive that fits under the mini and it runs cool.
a nas is the way to go but you still need a good backup in case the nas fails. i have 2 friends both in the IT trade and they both lost thousands of $$$$ when their nas failed and they lost all the data on the nas. 1 friend had over $3000 of purchased apple music that was lost and the other friend had over 1000 cd's ripped to his nas and the he gave away all his cd's and the unit failed.
my setup in my den contains: totem speakers, definitive technology supercube sub, sony 9000es dvd/cd/sacd, nikko fm tuner, dk design vs-1, adcom gda-700 dac, audio alchemy dti, mac mini, and airport express. i have both the dvp9000es and the airport express hooked up to the dti to cleanup the jitter, and from the dti to the dac.
i have other rooms with airport express unit hooked up to receivers in those rooms. i have my macbook control the mac mini running itunes from the other parts of the house. i'm purchasing an ipod touch that will also allow me to control the mac mini running itunes from anywhere in the house. |
1. get the best dac you can afford. i use a non-usb dac. if this is for your critical listening room instead of just background music, i would look at dacs from : audio research, mark levinson, classe, bel canto, and there are others.
2. do some experimenting. some people might hear the difference and others might not.
3. if you want to use the ipod, you are pretty stuck with itunes. you also want to look at who provides the airport express options that others might not have. i like itunes myself.
4. a hard drive is a hard drive. if you are going to have a large repository of tunes and if you will be serving possible multiple macs/pc's in your house, i would look at raid network attached devices as an option.
5. i use it with good success. i also use an audio alchemy DTI device to clean up the jitter from the airport express toslink output, then i go into an external dac from the dti.
6. wired is already better if you can use it. i use wireless to an airport express device with good success. i use 802.11g, i wouldn't want to try this with anything less, 802.11n would be better.
7. your on it now. |
Hdomke - there are differences in wireless networks. 802.11a is actually better for streaming data because of its 5ghz freq range rather than 802.11g. your 802.11n router has to communicate with your airport express at 54mb, which is 802.11g speed. When using wireless technology to stream data, you need a very good signal from the source to your destination or you run the risk of lost packets, packet retransmissions, latency issues, delays, etc.. which could degrade the signal or at least cause dropouts. Another way to improve network transmission is to get network devices that support QOS.
you asked about wired or wireless. if you have cat 5e or better cable to your locations in the house, by all means use a wired connection. I have this cable and my whole house uses 1 gb switches so each wired connection is able to communicate with the other macs/file servers at 1gb speed.. File sharing and mac sharing has never been faster. also, i just read that apple is supporting blu ray. if/when they come up with a hi def audio that macs can play, you will need the extra bandwidth.
You mentioned why not purchase a complete system from a vendor. My reply is that they don't have any better sound than what you can build for quite a bit less $$$. If you have read TAS lately, they reviewed a couple of media servers that cost $$$$'s. They still had to hook them up to an external dac to get them to sound their best. look at the latest review of the mcintosh media server for $6000. the reviewer indicated for thousands less, you can create your own server that would sound just as good or better than the mcintosh unit.
there are a couple ways to create a whole house audio distribution system IMO using macs. on the cheap side, use wired or wireless airport express devices in each room that you have an amp/speakers. you will be able to play 1 source to all devices or you can turn a room off. in each of the rooms, you can either connect the airport express straight to your receiver/preamp or you can hook it up to an external dac. to control itunes from each location, you can use leopards screen sharing to control the main itunes from a remote mac or use the itouch or iphone devices to remotely control the mac server.
The more expensive route (better quality, more flexible) is to use intelligent devices in each room to handle the network traffic better and to allow multiple itunes sources so you have different music in each room. I would deploy a used mac mini at each location where you have a audio system that is either hooked up wired or wireless. all these mac mini's would share the common itunes repository off the media server directly, no need to remote control the server. each mac mini would be hooked up to a monitor or tv to produce the screen to control everything. if no screen is available, you can still control the mini from another mac or itouch/iphone.
good luck |
with what macs provide and the interface with itunes with the flexibility of distributed music throughout the home, i just can't see the reason to go with Qsonix or sooloos. according to articles and other threads on different forums, you still need a good external dac with these 2 units. you might get a different interface (better is in the eyes of the user), but as far as i can tell, thats about it. a dealer try to sell a customer a $6000 qsonix setup and he almost went for it. after we talked, he decided on a macintosh setup with a 2 tb nas (raid 5 setup), a couple mac minis around the house for music distribution (multi source capable from the central itunes library) and internet access in those rooms, an airport express and 2 apple tv's. we also included jitter reduction devices and decent external dacs for better quality music in 2 rooms for for around 1/2 the cost of a qsonix standalone unit. |
