Glory,
I desolder the power cable from a stock SMPS OR I buy the one off of mp3car. It tends to be cheaper to buy a supply off ebay and steal the cable from it. I built my own DC cable on my last supply using the wire we use in Mojo Audio power cables. I just stole the connector off of the original cable. The DC connectors themselves aren't sold OEM unfortunately.
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I agree that having 4gigs of RAM is a necessity on the Mac Mini. If you buy one with less RAM it's fairly easy to upgrade. A SSD helps the performance of the system, but I didn't hear much audible benefit by adding one. Though it wasn't non-existent.
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Surface scratches on a CD actually don't damage the content of the CD. The plastic cover is usually what is scratched and it's fairly easy for the computer to read around the scratches unless the disk had a wire brush taken to it. CDs are buffered and rebuffered while being copied. If you RIP them to a lossless format at a high bitrate they will be bit perfect on the computer. The issue more so is outputting that file to the DAC. That's why Pure Music and Amarra have been getting popular. I found they they both sound different, it'll be a personal preference as to which you prefer. I use Pure Music.
I desolder the power cable from a stock SMPS OR I buy the one off of mp3car. It tends to be cheaper to buy a supply off ebay and steal the cable from it. I built my own DC cable on my last supply using the wire we use in Mojo Audio power cables. I just stole the connector off of the original cable. The DC connectors themselves aren't sold OEM unfortunately.
--
I agree that having 4gigs of RAM is a necessity on the Mac Mini. If you buy one with less RAM it's fairly easy to upgrade. A SSD helps the performance of the system, but I didn't hear much audible benefit by adding one. Though it wasn't non-existent.
--
Surface scratches on a CD actually don't damage the content of the CD. The plastic cover is usually what is scratched and it's fairly easy for the computer to read around the scratches unless the disk had a wire brush taken to it. CDs are buffered and rebuffered while being copied. If you RIP them to a lossless format at a high bitrate they will be bit perfect on the computer. The issue more so is outputting that file to the DAC. That's why Pure Music and Amarra have been getting popular. I found they they both sound different, it'll be a personal preference as to which you prefer. I use Pure Music.