And if you want small, I hear a new Mac Mini is arriving soon. They are very popular as music servers.
Seeking guidance for a very small/easy music server / vs a DAP
Hello all,
Long story short, after previously enjoying years and years of a Cary/Harbeth setup, I now find myself living in a smallish urban apartment in Buenos Aires. I bought and brought down a pair of Peachtree M24 speakers, plugged in my Astell & Kern AKjr, and have been using that until I knew if I was going to be staying here. Looks like I am, and I'll be back in the US shortly, so I'm looking to get some better sound in a fairly compact package to bring back down with me.
I'm looking at getting, most likely, a pair of Dynaudio XEO 20s. This is based upon prior positive experience listening to Dynaudio studio monitors, and the convenience of having a remote volume control and bluetooth in the speakers without any additional boxes.
The AK Jr produces sound quality that I'm ok with, but the interface is maddeningly slow, so I'm tempted by the newer A&K Norma which is reputed to have a much better interface speed and, I'll presume, better sound. But the XEO 20's are fully active and as a result I'd be feeding a DAC into an ADC in the speakers. The Norma doesn't have a digital out or it might just be perfect. Looking further into other DAPs it seems they get further away from a simple audio player and more into a full featured Android device - something I'm really just not looking for / interested in. I favor a simple, functional, low lag interface, quick boot time, and little else.
But the lack of digital out leads me to considering a small footprint music server. However, there are a LOT of product classes and choices out there, the vast majority of which do a lot of things that I don't care about (all the streaming options, multi-room, Roon, ethernet, MQA, Airplay, etc etc etc).
All I'm really looking for is a very compact, simple, reasonable quality device to house about 200gb of mostly FLAC files and play them to, presumably, a pair of Dynaudio active speakers. If I found the right device with a digital out, I think that'd be a good solution and I can just keep the AK Jr for the car and live with it's slow interface. I don't want an iPad to control my music collection if I can avoid it, and I'd rather not be forced to use an app on my iPhone. I don't care to have to learn a lot of new software, have any subscription services, or go down too many rabbit holes. I do not mind at all walking a few feet to my AK Jr every hour or so to choose the next thing to listen too, though I do wish it had a more responsive interface. I don't care for worlds of connectivity and streaming options, Roon, MQA, and so many other new technologies. It would be nice if the device was silent, didn't generate heat, booted quickly, and auto-powered off.
As far as cost goes I'm open minded but probably looking for something under about $1000, largely because anything more expensive than that is probably more than I'm going to take advantage of in this apartment.
All that said am I missing some really cool sector of the music server/player world out there that I should be looking at? Any recommendations? Should I just stick with a DAP and live with the fact that I'm connecting a DAC to an ADC? Are there some great active speakers out there in the $2000 range that will take an analog in to a class A/B amp but also have bluetooth connectivity for when we want to watch something on youtube? For the most part it seems the active speaker world is moving rapidly to DSP crossovers and digital amps just before the driver, which technologically seems to make good sense unless you're going to stay analog from source to speaker.
As well, if someone tells me that Roon will change my life with zero added complexity, that's cool too but I don't understand (yet) why or how... my FLACs (and some old non FLAC stuff) are such a mish-mash of tagged and not tagged, named and not named, messy and whatnot, that I manually cleaned them up into a folder structure that I like and just browse the folder structure to play music as I've never found software for a Mac nor a music player that can recognize more than about 1/2 of it and/or was more effective than browsing by folder.
Cheers in advance and I really do appreciate any and all advice, thoughts, pointers, etc...
Long story short, after previously enjoying years and years of a Cary/Harbeth setup, I now find myself living in a smallish urban apartment in Buenos Aires. I bought and brought down a pair of Peachtree M24 speakers, plugged in my Astell & Kern AKjr, and have been using that until I knew if I was going to be staying here. Looks like I am, and I'll be back in the US shortly, so I'm looking to get some better sound in a fairly compact package to bring back down with me.
I'm looking at getting, most likely, a pair of Dynaudio XEO 20s. This is based upon prior positive experience listening to Dynaudio studio monitors, and the convenience of having a remote volume control and bluetooth in the speakers without any additional boxes.
The AK Jr produces sound quality that I'm ok with, but the interface is maddeningly slow, so I'm tempted by the newer A&K Norma which is reputed to have a much better interface speed and, I'll presume, better sound. But the XEO 20's are fully active and as a result I'd be feeding a DAC into an ADC in the speakers. The Norma doesn't have a digital out or it might just be perfect. Looking further into other DAPs it seems they get further away from a simple audio player and more into a full featured Android device - something I'm really just not looking for / interested in. I favor a simple, functional, low lag interface, quick boot time, and little else.
But the lack of digital out leads me to considering a small footprint music server. However, there are a LOT of product classes and choices out there, the vast majority of which do a lot of things that I don't care about (all the streaming options, multi-room, Roon, ethernet, MQA, Airplay, etc etc etc).
All I'm really looking for is a very compact, simple, reasonable quality device to house about 200gb of mostly FLAC files and play them to, presumably, a pair of Dynaudio active speakers. If I found the right device with a digital out, I think that'd be a good solution and I can just keep the AK Jr for the car and live with it's slow interface. I don't want an iPad to control my music collection if I can avoid it, and I'd rather not be forced to use an app on my iPhone. I don't care to have to learn a lot of new software, have any subscription services, or go down too many rabbit holes. I do not mind at all walking a few feet to my AK Jr every hour or so to choose the next thing to listen too, though I do wish it had a more responsive interface. I don't care for worlds of connectivity and streaming options, Roon, MQA, and so many other new technologies. It would be nice if the device was silent, didn't generate heat, booted quickly, and auto-powered off.
As far as cost goes I'm open minded but probably looking for something under about $1000, largely because anything more expensive than that is probably more than I'm going to take advantage of in this apartment.
All that said am I missing some really cool sector of the music server/player world out there that I should be looking at? Any recommendations? Should I just stick with a DAP and live with the fact that I'm connecting a DAC to an ADC? Are there some great active speakers out there in the $2000 range that will take an analog in to a class A/B amp but also have bluetooth connectivity for when we want to watch something on youtube? For the most part it seems the active speaker world is moving rapidly to DSP crossovers and digital amps just before the driver, which technologically seems to make good sense unless you're going to stay analog from source to speaker.
As well, if someone tells me that Roon will change my life with zero added complexity, that's cool too but I don't understand (yet) why or how... my FLACs (and some old non FLAC stuff) are such a mish-mash of tagged and not tagged, named and not named, messy and whatnot, that I manually cleaned them up into a folder structure that I like and just browse the folder structure to play music as I've never found software for a Mac nor a music player that can recognize more than about 1/2 of it and/or was more effective than browsing by folder.
Cheers in advance and I really do appreciate any and all advice, thoughts, pointers, etc...