Which personal confuser for ultra high end audio, MAC, PC, notebook, tablet or desktop?


Hello all!

Existing circumstances dictate the OS must be either Windows, or MAC, only.

My daily “lots of use” desktop pc is an 32 bit XP OS Dell that was used by the Spanish Inquisition.

I’ve made minor upgrades to RAM and HDD only.

I need a new personal confuser. I’m gonna get one quite soon. I need to know going forward which platform and configuration will serve a digital sourced front end best in 2017.

That is, of course, if there is still any significant disparity between MAC and PC OS with regard to present software, or hardware limitations or other concerns.

My barely used 4 year old windows 7 Dell 64bit box never has run Office 2010 right but does enable PCM file playback via Lynx AES Exp SC and JRiver & Foobar 2K and iTunes infrequently.

I’ve only had exp with Windows machines. However, I own Apple iPad Air II and iPhone 6 S. but I’m a pretty quick study so adapting to a new OS ought not be a big deal.

I do not have a working laptop and one would be a real aid for day to day situations as well as ripping and playing files, streaming audio playing videos, and so forth.

This latest ‘new’ machine will be a daily use computer for office oriented affairs as well. Email. Correspondence. Archiving documents. Data collection. Contacts.

I’m leaning towards a MAC, but not sure which way. IMac or Ibook? Both appear as semi portable and the Imac can sport a 4 or 5K display. The display isn’t a big deal for me bit the RAM and CPU needed to support the far greater resolutions of a 4 – 5K display would be nice IMO. Computer Horse power is always a plus.

The only issue I see with the iMac, is the thing itself. It’s a big display and looks like a problem waiting to happen when wiring it up or into the LAN and audio system.

I have a Synology Disc Station NAS. The plan is to acquire a versatile DAC for DSD and Tidal playback.

Am willing to add whatever else thereafter to achieve the intended goal mentioned above. Apps, additional hardware, etc.

Your experiences and Thoughts would be most welcome.

blindjim

Showing 4 responses by jond

Jim sorry that is the best autocorrect ever! I would be happy to be your personal confuser as I seem to have been confused a good chunk of my life! :-p
Jim a more serious answer to your question then I am also a bit of a computer neophyte but set up a streaming setup first with a Sonos Connect which I later upgraded to an Auralic Aries Mini. I stream wirelessly from a Synology NAS drive as well as streaming Tidal outputting to an Audio Note Dac via the coax output on the Aries. My setup does require wifi my modem is in my office and system in the living room but I've had no hiccups to speak of streaming wirelessly. I love the Auralic Lightning DS app it's easy to use and setup and pretty feature rich. Just my own experiences I hope they are helpful to you in some way. Cheers!
Jim the Aries was indeed an upgrade in both sound quality and user interface but what really spurred me to change initially was wireless capability. The Sonos I was using was wireless but only on a single band the legacy 3.4 ghz band, which in my urban environment, downtown DC, was quite crowded. The Aries has a dual band modem and can run on the newer much less crowded 5 ghz band. Since making the change overall performance and ease of use improved and the intermittent dropouts I was experiencing with Sonos stopped. Don't worry too much you're a good part of the way there,  for me another big step forward in sound quality was when I introduced my Synology NAS to the system so you have that going for you already.
Jim to answer your question about the 5ghz network the Lightning DS setup process takes you through that and is available for both IOS and Android systems, I used an ipad mini essentially as a remote control.