Experience with Mach2 Music Server?

It is very nice to see so many experienced Mac users here!

If you don't mind, I have few questions:

1. In your opinion, what are the advantages of Mac Mini (or any other Mac computer product) over PC laptop or HTPC running Win 7, 64 bit? Since I am aware how switching power affects audio, I am not interested in comments on that subject. Also, the usual laptop “display noise” is not an issue for me.

2. In your experience, is there any audio quality difference between files stored on the internal HDD/SSD, and the same stored on external USB and Firewire HDD?

3. Is there Apple audio playback software available that can let you use the audio device internal buffer in pull mode? Can you adjust device buffer offset and latency? Down to how many samples?

4. In your experience with Mac, is it better loading the audio file to the RAM and play it from memory or not? What difference do you hear?

Thanks!
Alex Peychev

Come on guys, I got so excited about your advises that I bought a Mac Mini. Now I can’t wait to receive it and experience its glory!

Well, worse comes to worst, I can always load Win7, 64Bit and JRiver to it. :-)

Stay tuned!

Best,
Alex Peychev

I have a question about the drive setups.
A lot of people seem to favour to replace the internal 320GB drive with a small SSD and have larger external storage. This because of percieved lower noise if I understood correctly. So when you play back your music do you then first copy music from your external storage and load onto the internal SSD? I would figure the electrical noise is larger from playing back via the external using FW/USB interface than using the original drive inside?
Has anyone done any comparisons on this before upgrading or are there other significant pluses from the SSD? I thought sequential access was slower on the SSD?
FYI Im Pro Mac so very much look forward to Alex realizing the superiority of the Mac:-)

FYI Im Pro Mac so very much look forward to Alex realizing the superiority of the Mac:-)

What a dreamer! :-)

Alex

I finally have my mac mini based server running as above. It sounds great through the W4S DAC and I am sure it will be better in a week of continuous play. My only mistake was the Nitro AV firewire hub. It was not recognized by the mac mini and I am not sure why. I had to daisy chain the three drive - 1 the backup from the original mac mini, the other the 1T Lacie drives with the apple lossless CDs stored in mirror images.

The SSD is working fine.

I am driving the system remotely from my Mac Pro, but I will go the Ipad route when the next version is released. The price for the original should go down then and I need it to do very little.